Technocracy always struck me as weirdly incoherent? If you take the economy, probably the most studied of government policies, it is not 1 number. There are many questions about what priorities ought to be. There is no 'expert' answer for how many starving poor people are a worthy trade off for a GDP point. Even if there was, there is an economist branch that disagrees with any possible position you might take. The question of which experts to listen to almost entirely subsumes the question of what experts say. More than anything it's a branding strategy. "Putting me, a surveillance investor, in charge of international relations is clearly more rational and scientific than putting the other guy in charge."
It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.
It’s interesting that the theory of Quantum Mechanics emerged just after this point and threw a wrench in the idea that the universe could be neatly explained through a universal single theory, suddenly there were more questions than answers. And Einstein famously hated quantum physics.
There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.
I don't know why it would matter, but Einstein didn't hate quantum mechanics. He literally got his Nobel prize for his role in discovering quantum mechanics. He is one of the earliest people to propose that light exists in quantised packets.
He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.
While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.
Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.
I read and enjoyed the book " what is real" by Adam Becker that talks about this intersection between the philosophy of the day and its impact on what more considered valid interpretations of QM at the time and into the future. The logical positivists had a lot of impact on popular conception of quantum stuff, even to this day. Great read
It also didn't hurt that the economic equivalent of Newtonian physics (that is, if you make a lot of simplifying assumptions that all seem reasonable on their own) points to essentially laissez-faire free market capitalism as welfare-maximizing policy. It is not only better, but a moral imperative that you pursue such policy, lest you burden society with deadweight loss!
Perfectly timed at a critical point in history when the public and policymakers were fighting it out over Socialism. Economics not only provided the feeling of modernity grounded in scientific truth-seeking, but also conveniently aligned with the interests of big businesses at the time.
The same is still true today. People still fetishize science, and still fail to understand the difference between science and pseudoscience. And we are still teaching the same pseudoscience over and over in undergrad economics programs across USA, turning out generation after generation of confused 21 year olds who think they understand everything about the world because they read Hazlitt and plotted some indifference curves.
Economics is very deliberately a pseudo-science. Orthodox economics starts from neoliberal moral beliefs and tries to justify and excuse them.
It's about controlling the narrative, not about modelling consequences.
Example: the way the supply shocks of the oil crises in the 70s and 80s were converted into a "keep wages low and raise interest rates to prevent inflation" narrative, when the rational solution would have been to move the economy away from dependence on oil as soon as possible.
its why in the old days they used to call it "political-economy"... removing the political part does it a big disservice because its now ignoring the biggest influence (politics) on the thing and instead treats it like a machine that just need tooling once in a while.
I don't think so. Ideally, you still have normal people deciding tradeoffs like today, it's just that the reasoning and the suggested solutions to problems have to be scientifically and logically sound.
The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.
Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.
(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)
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Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.
The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.
Hubris. Is the same mindset that leads to socialism, central planning, social darwinism, etc. The temptation of "theory" without the suffering from pesky reality.
"All phenomena involved in the functional operation of the social mechanism are measurable"
From the article, reminded me that the complexities and nuance of life at the ground level really are lost on some.
Even if you genuinely could measure every single detail of life and the forces that move the economy, no committee of experts could ever hope to reason through the data and make coherent solutions that actually survive reality.
There’s multiple corporations. When you have state level central planning there’s no adversarial check or feedback mechanism. Nothing challenges it to see if it’s actually doing a good job.
Of course this is also a strong argument for antitrust. In some markets today there is basically one corporation or a few that seem more interlocked than competing. That starts to be indistinguishable from Soviet bureaus.
HN is full of left-populists these days and any slightly negative mention of socialism or central planning (their equivalent utopian vision) triggers them.
I think this suggests it's more than just hubris, it's religion. These aren't just ideas, they are belief systems and identities for people. Hence why someone would downvote a benign internet comment like yours.
The steady decline of traditional religions has left people searching for meaning in other ways, and it has manifested in all sorts of bizarre belief systems and behavior over the past 200ish years, technocracy being one of them.
I would equate similar values to people who think socialism and central planning are somehow linked and share the same criticisms. Probably 90% of criticism I hear about socialism is complete and utter nonsense. Co-op businesses are socialist ideals in practice and co-ops have consistently gained market share over the last 80+ years, and it is neither linked to or shares any of the problems as central planning.
Im all for reading criticism about economic models, but it seems like the vast majority of it has nothing to do with anything Marx proposed or idealized and is just translocated hatred of authoritarian policies which is far more often in opposition to Marxist principles than supporting them. Socialist ideaology far more directly supports democratic workplaces and democratic economic decisions than centralized leadership and control.
Well you're criticizing shitty thinkers rightfully w.r.t
to co-ops; they're great, they aren't top-down.
But you're committing the same error. Co-ops are completely compatible with capitalism so holding them up as contrast doesn't make much sense. Show me non-authoritarian Marxism at the scale Marx so confidently predicted.
Marx simply had a flawed understanding of economics and it's time we moved on. We have the data supporting the decision to do so. Usually when a theory makes completely incorrect predictions repeatedly, we abandon it. But apparently marxists know better than everyone. Do they have some secret data set?
Something exists in capitalism so therefore it can't be socialism? And im not going to get into another circular reasoning of "It didn't exist in that form before therefore it is impossible now." At no point have you pointed out anything Marx supported that is a problem other than a generalized brush of everything.
90% of Marxist work is a study of capitalism, much of which we still hold true today, so to me you look like everyone else that blindly dismisses what he said without learning what he even did or said.
I didn't say it wasn't socialism. I said it wasn't a counterexample. As for whether you still think it's worth taking Marx seriously as an economist, I'm guessing you'd laugh at someone citing Smith. Yet one had a better track record than the other. My point was simply that a theory should be judged on its merits, it's predictions, it's actual outcomes.
It seems to be an assemblage of random political ranting (derived from mainstream US politics) instead of addressing anything about the Technocracy movement of the 1930s.
Technocracy sounds good in theory, but if you understand human nature and economics you'll realize that technocratic governance makes no sense. It's up to humans to decide what to do, with value judgements about what they want to give up in exchange for what they want. It is the role of technology to facilitate the implementation. We certainly hope to have leaders who are literate in science and tech, but science and tech are not a value system.
Technocracy rose roughly simultaneously with the Good Government movement of the 1920s. Both were a response to the machine politics and crony capitalism of the gilded age.
Commenters here are getting confused. There's technocracy, the governance[1]. And Technocracy, the pseudo-cult movement[2]. They quickly evolved into different things with different ideologies. The article is mostly about the latter movement.
Back in the 1980s, I lived in Redlands, California, when the last adherents of this movement were still alive. From my conversations with them, it seemed the movement evolved into a semi-new age cult ala Scientology and the Process Church of the Final Judgement[1] (the original cult, not the one borne later, from the time later Skinny Puppy album). In the end, it felt like an anti-technology movement.
There was significant overlap between Scientology's Dianetics and Technocracy. At that time, they didn't seem to be very technology-inclined or tech-positive.
Nonetheless, despite being in their 80s or 90s, they were still quite devout and had their clothing and automobiles decorated with Technocracy ephemera.
100 years later and here we are, linking to articles asking to sign up for a news letter before a single word can be read. Scroll 1 paragraph and get nagged again.
It's so wild to believe humanity held such a hopeful political mythos, ever.
And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions that builds that runs well. Mechanistic sympathy is a key term that sends the engineers heart aflutter; to work together holds great delight. The idea that there might be some shots for mankind at engineering not just a social, as the article highlights, but government itself has some real appeal, one that today seems doomed by mutual "it will will never work" / "it will never happen" anti-willpower.
Reciprocally through, I think many alas agree broadly (beyond Africa) with this the dark assessment of the political offered by Captain Ibrahim Traoré who today announced an end of Democracy, seemingly appointed himself dictator of Burka Faso:
> "The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker."
I do wish there were a stronger engineering to politics pipeline. Politics being such a money and campaigning game, a game of mass appeal, really ruins so much. Thats both a problem with the electorate, but also a problem with how we've let democracy evolve, how mass media and the courts and our systems themselves have iterated over the years. It would just be so nice to think we could take our living documents, our systems, & spirit them forward to respond to all that become, and hopefully redeem our collaborative search for a better more orderly well functioning state & world.
Maybe we should all fly that Vermillion & Chromium monad flag (the technocracy's flag), at least a bit, in our hearts!
(The Technocracy are also a fantastic somewhat unrelated quasi villain in the White Wolf game Mage, engineers of all manners including social working to end the undue influence of the supernatural on the world, defending and sometimes tyrannizing mankind with science. It's a lovely connection to know both Technocracies bit!)
Technology did change the world, and technocrats did shape it. This was part of what Burnham called the "managerial revolution". In the 1930s the fascists, communists, and New Dealers all took the reins and governed their societies in new technocratic ways. It has never really changed ever since.
The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:
"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.
Expected to read about past and current connections between technocracy and fascism. Was not disappointed.
Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.
The article spends a lot of time on criticising technocratic ideas of tech capitalists, who haven’t actually achieved anything in the political sphere so far, and doesn’t even mention China where quite a few of strikingly similar ideas are being implemented under the guise of a Marxist/Jinpingist system with modern characteristics.
“ However, the overall track record for technology being revolutionary on its own is poor. For the last 20-some-odd years, technological progress has been reduced to maximizing attention in the form of gimmicks, addiction, and apps nobody needs. It’s hardly the sci-fi future many once wrote about. ”
Ah yes all technological progress like AI, EVs and biotech are all bad because social media bad. Why is this article taken seriously
One thing is for sure, whether you like it or not countries that adopt policies that promote tech will outcompete and destroy other countries (metaphorically). You can’t do anything but watch technology take over. It doesn’t care about what you want or prefer.
“Like religious millenarianism awaiting the Second Coming, tech elites believe technology alone will usher in a total and complete transformation of society.”
This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite).
Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics
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It coalesced at a time when science was becoming more accessible to the masses, more educated technicians running around engaging in work and trade.
And these technicians were frustrated by bosses who didn't understand the science and technique behind things.
So there was great inefficiency because the bosses hadn't caught up to the technicians in their understanding of the world.
And so the political idea of "put in charge the people who actually understand the problem" caught hold of the technicians, and they were fired up for a period of time and they called it technocracy.
There’s something to be said about the cultural impact of quantum mechanics and how it shifted people’s perceptions from a universe that could eventually be explained by a set of fairly simple, understandable laws of physics to one that is much more complex, mysterious and contradictory. Suddenly the laws of the universe were defined by randomness and uncertainty, rather than determinism and easily understood logic.
He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.
While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.
Perfectly timed at a critical point in history when the public and policymakers were fighting it out over Socialism. Economics not only provided the feeling of modernity grounded in scientific truth-seeking, but also conveniently aligned with the interests of big businesses at the time.
The same is still true today. People still fetishize science, and still fail to understand the difference between science and pseudoscience. And we are still teaching the same pseudoscience over and over in undergrad economics programs across USA, turning out generation after generation of confused 21 year olds who think they understand everything about the world because they read Hazlitt and plotted some indifference curves.
Which then kind of defeats the purpose of experts in the sense of technocracy.
As an analogy, you can make a PhD in theology, but that is not proof that God exists.
It's about controlling the narrative, not about modelling consequences.
Example: the way the supply shocks of the oil crises in the 70s and 80s were converted into a "keep wages low and raise interest rates to prevent inflation" narrative, when the rational solution would have been to move the economy away from dependence on oil as soon as possible.
>
One issue with economy as a science is that it's a very soft science at best and just pseudoscience at worst.Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once stated “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”
There are falsifiable ideas and programs in economics—tax cuts paying for themselves, expansionary austerity, tariffs, etc—that are tried regularly:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionary_fiscal_contractio...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_the_Trump_administr...
The fact that the results of these experiments are ignored is hardly the fault of the those making correct predictions with correct models.
The submission[0] right next to this one shows why.
Apparently, in the US, you are now a criminal if you fly drones half a mile from ICE vehicles. Some of which may be unmarked and even if marked, how exactly do you verify no ICE vehicle is in a 0.785 square mile radius? Anybody capable of logical thought sees that this is BS.
(Also, anybody who retained primary school knowledge can calculate the area. But ask a person on the street to do it and watch your faith in humanity fall. Ask them to point out the area on a map and estimate how many cars that would be...)
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Even the lawyer who taught intro to law at my uni always said that the people who most often find contradictions in laws are engineers.
The problems always start when somebody takes an ideology too far. So let's figure out what is too far instead of rejecting the whole thing.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47633947
From the article, reminded me that the complexities and nuance of life at the ground level really are lost on some.
Even if you genuinely could measure every single detail of life and the forces that move the economy, no committee of experts could ever hope to reason through the data and make coherent solutions that actually survive reality.
Of course this is also a strong argument for antitrust. In some markets today there is basically one corporation or a few that seem more interlocked than competing. That starts to be indistinguishable from Soviet bureaus.
HN is full of left-populists these days and any slightly negative mention of socialism or central planning (their equivalent utopian vision) triggers them.
I think this suggests it's more than just hubris, it's religion. These aren't just ideas, they are belief systems and identities for people. Hence why someone would downvote a benign internet comment like yours.
The steady decline of traditional religions has left people searching for meaning in other ways, and it has manifested in all sorts of bizarre belief systems and behavior over the past 200ish years, technocracy being one of them.
Im all for reading criticism about economic models, but it seems like the vast majority of it has nothing to do with anything Marx proposed or idealized and is just translocated hatred of authoritarian policies which is far more often in opposition to Marxist principles than supporting them. Socialist ideaology far more directly supports democratic workplaces and democratic economic decisions than centralized leadership and control.
Marx simply had a flawed understanding of economics and it's time we moved on. We have the data supporting the decision to do so. Usually when a theory makes completely incorrect predictions repeatedly, we abandon it. But apparently marxists know better than everyone. Do they have some secret data set?
90% of Marxist work is a study of capitalism, much of which we still hold true today, so to me you look like everyone else that blindly dismisses what he said without learning what he even did or said.
It seems to be an assemblage of random political ranting (derived from mainstream US politics) instead of addressing anything about the Technocracy movement of the 1930s.
(Other instance was PredictiveHistory youtube here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrmERlHUqBk ).
Guessing that's not a coincidence
Fascinating
He writes about these things on this blog as well(https://berjon.com/ethicswishing/), and has a forthcoming book on related topics last I heard
It reminds me of the "Científicos" [1] in Mexico during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (early 1900s).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cient%C3%ADfico
The hippie movement was itself somewhat a response to the inroads Technocracy had made in American government, so argued in this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_a_Counter_Cultur...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
There was significant overlap between Scientology's Dianetics and Technocracy. At that time, they didn't seem to be very technology-inclined or tech-positive.
Nonetheless, despite being in their 80s or 90s, they were still quite devout and had their clothing and automobiles decorated with Technocracy ephemera.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_Church_of_the_Final_Ju...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_(EP)
https://youtu.be/E6yg5Rj9owk
And I see such appeal here. To make efficient, to make a government that functions that builds that runs well. Mechanistic sympathy is a key term that sends the engineers heart aflutter; to work together holds great delight. The idea that there might be some shots for mankind at engineering not just a social, as the article highlights, but government itself has some real appeal, one that today seems doomed by mutual "it will will never work" / "it will never happen" anti-willpower.
Reciprocally through, I think many alas agree broadly (beyond Africa) with this the dark assessment of the political offered by Captain Ibrahim Traoré who today announced an end of Democracy, seemingly appointed himself dictator of Burka Faso:
> "The truth is, politics in Africa – or at least what we've experienced in Burkina - is that a real politician is someone who embodies every vice: a liar, a sycophant, a smooth-talker."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly0zp1xgz3o
I do wish there were a stronger engineering to politics pipeline. Politics being such a money and campaigning game, a game of mass appeal, really ruins so much. Thats both a problem with the electorate, but also a problem with how we've let democracy evolve, how mass media and the courts and our systems themselves have iterated over the years. It would just be so nice to think we could take our living documents, our systems, & spirit them forward to respond to all that become, and hopefully redeem our collaborative search for a better more orderly well functioning state & world.
Maybe we should all fly that Vermillion & Chromium monad flag (the technocracy's flag), at least a bit, in our hearts!
(The Technocracy are also a fantastic somewhat unrelated quasi villain in the White Wolf game Mage, engineers of all manners including social working to end the undue influence of the supernatural on the world, defending and sometimes tyrannizing mankind with science. It's a lovely connection to know both Technocracies bit!)
There's a steady trickle of pretty good technocracy stories, btw. Some good reads, including Marageret Mead, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=technocracy
The permanent war economy of the United States never ceased, the constant monetary tweaking by the Federal Reserve never ceased, the "nudge units" and public relations firms that manage opinion never ceased. The television was and is a technocratic tool. The birth control pill, and pharmaceuticals generally, were and are technocratic tools. They are technological means by which to manage populations. As Yuval Harari puts it, the answer to "unnecessary people" is "drugs and computer games".
The main difference between the original technocracy movement, and what actually played out in history, is that the technicians and engineers operating the machinery of population management were never really in charge. They were merely instruments -- means to an end. Aldous Huxley explained the situation in 1958:
"By means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms -- elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest -- will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial -- but democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit."
Today the biggest challenges to the Western technocratic oligarchy are 1) loss of narrative control via the internet, 2) external threats from other great (technocratic) powers, and 3) internal decline and incompetence.
Musk, Altman, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Page, and the like are trying to implement technocracy. And that's something we should be resisting at every opportunity.
Written in the 50s it's prescient to what has been happening since.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
Ah yes all technological progress like AI, EVs and biotech are all bad because social media bad. Why is this article taken seriously
This is the standard view amongst most social theorists and economists. (Of course it’s not technology alone but that’s the prerequisite).
Without agriculture and the Industrial Revolution, say bye bye to your woke policies L G B T Q rights and feminism. Humans simply wont develop mentally while slogging in a farm or being hunter gatherers.
Surprisingly, Thiel has been quite right about this and the general populace whose sole ideology is “rich people bad” have not internalised some fundamental truths of ssociology and economics