Technocracy movement

Based on Wikipedia: Technocracy movement

In 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rounded up members of an organization they deemed subversive enough to ban outright. Among those arrested was a chiropractor from Regina named Joshua Norman Haldeman—a man whose grandson, Elon Musk, would one day become the world's richest person and a prominent voice for techno-optimism. The organization? Technocracy Incorporated, a movement that believed politicians and businesspeople had proven themselves incompetent to run modern society, and that engineers and scientists should take their place.

It's a story that feels eerily relevant today.

The Engineers Who Thought They Could Save America

The technocracy movement didn't emerge from nowhere. Its intellectual roots trace back to the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, when a new breed of engineer looked at the chaos of industrial capitalism and thought: we can do better.

These weren't wild-eyed revolutionaries. They were practical men who built bridges and designed factories. They saw waste everywhere—in duplicated effort, in boom-and-bust cycles, in the irrational decisions of markets. If you could engineer a railroad or a power plant, why couldn't you engineer a society?

The word "technocracy" itself was coined in 1919 by a California engineer named William H. Smyth. He defined it as "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers." Note the framing: the experts weren't supposed to be masters but servants, merely implementing what the people truly wanted more efficiently than elected representatives could manage.

Thorstein Veblen, an economist with a gift for biting social criticism, gave the movement its intellectual heft. His 1921 book, "The Engineers and the Price System," argued that businesspeople were structurally incapable of running industry for the public good. Their incentives were all wrong. They profited from scarcity, not abundance. They had every reason to throttle production, to let factories sit idle, to fire workers who could be making useful things.

Engineers, Veblen argued, understood production. They wanted to build, to optimize, to solve problems. Put them in charge, and you'd get more stuff for everyone.

Howard Scott and the Great Depression's Perfect Storm

The man who turned these ideas into a movement was Howard Scott, a figure shrouded in mystery and self-mythologizing. Scott claimed to have worked as an engineer on various industrial projects, though his credentials were frequently questioned. What he undeniably possessed was charisma and a talent for making complex ideas feel urgent.

In 1919, Scott founded the Technical Alliance in New York, assembling scientists and engineers to conduct what he called an "energy survey of North America." The project aimed to scientifically map out how energy flowed through the economy—from coal mines to factories to homes—as a foundation for redesigning society along rational lines. The group collapsed in 1921 before completing its work, but Scott never abandoned the vision.

Then came the Great Depression.

By 1932, the American economy had contracted by nearly a third. Unemployment hit 25 percent. Banks failed by the thousands. Factories that could produce goods sat idle while millions went hungry. The system, it seemed, was broken.

Into this void stepped the technocrats. Scott and his allies formed the Committee on Technocracy at Columbia University, and suddenly, the movement had the institutional credibility it had always lacked. The New York Times started covering their activities in June 1932, and interest exploded.

The appeal was obvious. Here were serious-looking men in suits—Technocracy Inc. members wore a distinctive uniform of double-breasted gray suits, gray shirts, and blue neckties with a "monad" symbol on the lapel—offering a scientific solution to what felt like civilizational collapse. They promised abundance through expertise. No more breadlines while grain rotted in silos. No more shantytowns while construction workers sat unemployed.

The Price System Must Go

At the heart of technocratic thinking was what they called the "price system"—basically, the entire mechanism of money, markets, and profit that organized modern economies. The technocrats argued this system was becoming obsolete, and dangerously so.

Here's the core insight, which remains thought-provoking even if you reject their conclusions: in a world of scarcity, prices make sense. If there's only so much wheat to go around, a price mechanism allocates it. People who value wheat most (or can afford to pay most) get it. Supply and demand reach equilibrium.

But what happens when technology makes abundance possible? The technocrats pointed to factories capable of producing far more than they did, to workers who wanted to work but couldn't find jobs, to resources left untapped because extracting them wasn't profitable. In their view, the price system was actively preventing prosperity. It could only distribute goods through exchange, which required scarcity to function. Abundance would crash the system.

"Price and abundance are incompatible," Technocracy Inc. declared in 1938. "The greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance there can be no price at all."

This wasn't quite Marxism, though the technocrats drew fire from both capitalists who saw them as communists and communists who saw them as bourgeois reformers. The technocrats explicitly rejected partisan politics and revolution alike. They thought the problem was technical, not political. You didn't need to seize the means of production; you needed to run them properly.

Energy Certificates Instead of Money

If you abolish money, what replaces it? The technocrats had an answer: energy accounting.

Howard Scott developed what he called an "energy theory of value." His reasoning went like this: every product and service requires energy to create. Mining coal takes energy. Manufacturing steel takes energy. Growing food takes energy. Even services like haircuts or legal advice ultimately rest on energy expenditure. Therefore, energy was the one universal measure that could serve as a scientific basis for economic calculation.

Instead of dollars, citizens in a technocracy would receive "energy certificates"—a kind of allowance representing their share of the continent's total productive capacity. These weren't money in the traditional sense. They would expire regularly, couldn't be accumulated or traded, and would be allocated equally to all citizens from birth to death. You'd use them to select the goods and services you wanted, and the system would track consumption to ensure balanced production.

The technocrats envisioned a continent-wide system running from Panama to the North Pole—they called it the "Technate"—because they believed this geographic unit contained the natural resources needed for self-sufficiency. National borders, in their view, were as irrational as the price system itself.

The Four-Hour Workday

One of the movement's most appealing promises was dramatically reduced work. Their calculations suggested that with properly organized production, every citizen could work just four consecutive days per week, four hours per day, followed by three days off.

The math, as they presented it, was straightforward. Modern technology had multiplied productive capacity many times over. The only reason people still worked long hours was the inefficiency of the price system, which created artificial scarcity and duplicated effort. Eliminate waste, optimize production, and four hours of daily work would generate more than enough for everyone.

By rotating seven groups of workers through the week, industry could operate continuously—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—while each individual enjoyed more leisure than any previous generation had dreamed possible. The "weekend effect," where facilities sat idle while everyone rested simultaneously, would disappear.

This vision of automated abundance delivering leisure to the masses has echoed through subsequent decades, from 1960s predictions of twenty-hour workweeks to contemporary debates about universal basic income and artificial intelligence displacing human labor. The technocrats were early, but they weren't wrong that technology would raise fundamental questions about work and distribution.

The Movement's Collapse—and Survival

Public fascination with technocracy peaked between June 1932 and January 1933—roughly seven months. Then Howard Scott gave a radio address that changed everything.

On January 13, 1933, Scott spoke to a nationwide audience from the Hotel Pierre in New York. He was attempting to answer his critics, to explain technocracy's vision to millions of Americans. By most accounts, he failed spectacularly. Listeners found his speech confusing and uninspiring. Critics piled on. The press, which had treated technocracy with respectful curiosity, turned hostile. Business leaders ridiculed the movement. The American Engineering Council accused the technocrats of "unprofessional activity, questionable data, and drawing unwarranted conclusions."

What happened? Part of it was Scott himself—his credentials were shaky, and close scrutiny revealed gaps in his claimed expertise. Part of it was the movement's internal contradictions. The technocrats demanded radical transformation but rejected the political tools—elections, organizing, revolution—that might achieve it. They insisted on remaining above partisan politics, which meant they had no mechanism for gaining power.

And then there was Franklin Roosevelt.

The New Deal offered a middle path: reform capitalism rather than replace it. Use government intervention to smooth the worst edges of the market while preserving its basic structure. For many Americans who had flirted with technocracy, the New Deal provided enough hope to pull back from more radical alternatives.

Historian William E. Akin argues the movement's decline stemmed from a deeper failure: the technocrats never developed "a viable political theory for achieving change." They diagnosed problems brilliantly but had no answer to the question of how to get from here to there.

Yet the movement didn't die entirely. Technocracy Incorporated limped on, especially along the West Coast and in Canada. The 1940 Canadian ban—prompted by the organization's opposition to World War II—actually generated sympathy. When the ban lifted in 1943 after Technocracy Inc. endorsed the war effort, the movement briefly expanded into new territories.

In 1946 and 1947, there were speaking tours and a remarkable motorcade from Los Angeles to Vancouver: hundreds of gray-painted cars, trucks, and trailers, a converted school bus with sleeping quarters and a two-way radio, war-surplus searchlights, gray motorcycles, and even a small gray aircraft with the monad symbol on its wings. All of it filmed by technocrats on color film for posterity.

By 1948, enthusiasm was waning again. The price system stubbornly refused to collapse. Specific predictions—that the system would fail by 1937, or "prior to 1940"—had proven embarrassingly wrong. Membership declined steadily through subsequent decades.

Remarkably, though, Technocracy Incorporated survived into the twenty-first century. As of 2013, the organization still published a newsletter, maintained a website, and held member meetings. The website later announced new ownership and a "Transition Plan 2016." An extensive archive of Technocracy materials sits at the University of Alberta, waiting for historians.

The Streetcar Argument

One image from Technocracy Inc.'s promotional materials captures the movement's philosophy perfectly. It involves a streetcar.

The problem: passengers insist on riding on the car's outer platform, which is dangerous. The political solution would be to pass laws against it, impose fines, lecture people about safety. These solutions depend on changing human behavior through persuasion or punishment.

The engineering solution: design streetcars without platforms.

This example illustrates the technocratic mindset's appeal and its blind spots. On one hand, it's often genuinely easier to change systems than to change people. Designing safer products prevents more accidents than safety campaigns. Building cities for pedestrians reduces car deaths more effectively than driver education. The insight is real.

On the other hand, the analogy breaks down when you ask: who decides what problems to solve? Who determines that the platform is dangerous rather than, say, liberating? A technocratic society might be wonderfully efficient at achieving its goals—but goals are precisely what politics is supposed to determine. Remove politics, and you haven't eliminated value judgments; you've just hidden them.

Technocracy Beyond America

The American movement wasn't unique. Similar currents flowed elsewhere, sometimes with darker outcomes.

In Germany before World War II, a technocratic movement modeled on Technocracy Incorporated briefly existed before running afoul of the Nazi regime. The Nazis, despite their industrial ambitions, had little patience for apolitical experts who might challenge party authority.

The Soviet Union had its own technocratic strain, which met a grimmer fate. Engineer Peter Palchinsky was one of its leading figures, promoting what supporters called "scientization" of economic development and management. The Engineer's Herald journal advanced the slogan: "the future belongs to the managing-engineers and the engineering-managers."

For a time, these ideas had powerful backers. Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, prominent members of the Communist Party's Right Opposition, supported the technocrats. But Joseph Stalin saw them as rivals. In 1929, Palchinsky was executed. A year later, the Industrial Party Trial accused leading Soviet engineers of an anti-government conspiracy. The subsequent persecution forced surviving engineers to focus narrowly on technical tasks assigned by party leaders, abandoning any broader social vision.

Alexander Bogdanov, perhaps the most important non-Leninist Bolshevik, developed ideas with technocratic resonance through his concept of "Tectology"—a kind of proto-systems theory. His science fiction and political writings, scholars have noted, implied that he expected revolution against capitalism to produce a technocratic society. Bogdanov died in 1928 after a blood transfusion experiment, before Stalin's purges could reach him.

Why It Still Matters

The technocracy movement failed. Its predictions proved wrong. Its organizations dwindled to insignificance. And yet its questions haven't gone away.

Every time someone argues that elected officials are too ignorant to make policy about technology, or that partisan gridlock prevents rational solutions to obvious problems, they're echoing the technocrats. Every time someone proposes replacing human judgment with algorithmic optimization, they're walking a path the technocrats explored first. Every time debates about artificial intelligence turn to the question of who benefits from automated abundance, they're grappling with puzzles the technocrats raised in the 1930s.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's argument for "independent experts" in government reflects a technocratic intuition that persists across the political spectrum: the sense that democracy, for all its virtues, is often irrational, that experts know things the public doesn't, that some decisions are too important or too complex for partisan politics.

The technocrats' critics had answers too. Democracy, they argued, wasn't just a mechanism for making decisions; it was a way of legitimizing them. Efficiency wasn't the only value. The "socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values." You could have expertise and democracy, abundance and freedom—you just had to be cleverer about institutional design.

That debate continues. When we argue about whether central banks should be independent, whether judges should defer to agency experts, whether algorithms should make consequential decisions about hiring or lending or criminal justice, we're still arguing about technocracy. The gray-suited movement of the 1930s may be gone, but its ghost haunts every conversation about who should run the world.

And somewhere, in that ghost's lineage, is a teenager in South Africa whose grandfather was arrested by the Canadian Mounties for belonging to an organization that thought engineers should replace politicians—a teenager who would grow up to build electric cars and rockets, to buy Twitter, and to advise governments on how technology should reshape society.

The technocrats lost. But their questions won.