Technocracy Incorporated

The Technocracy Monad, representing balance, is the official symbol of Technocracy, Inc.
Abbreviation	TechInc
Formation	1933
Type	NPO
Headquarters	Ferndale, Washington
Official language	English
Website	http://www.technocracy.org/

Technocracy Incorporated is a non-profit technocracy organization, formed in 1933, which proposed a non-political governmental system. Technocracy advocates contended that capitalist forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a more rational and productive type of society headed by technical experts.^[1] However, the technocrats' popularity was short-lived.^[2]

Overview

Technocracy is a hypothetical form of government in which scientists and technical experts administer; "technocracy is described as that society in which those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge". It is a form of planned economy. The term came to mean government by technical decision making in 1932.^[3]

Technocracy Incorporated's headquarters were originally situated in New York. It has moved several times through its history, and is currently located in Ferndale, Washington. Howard Scott became the first Director of Technocracy Incorporated in 1933, a position he held until his death.^{[citation needed]}

Technocracy Inc. officials wore a uniform, consisting of a "well-tailored double-breasted suit, gray shirt, and blue necktie, with a monad insignia on the lapel", and its members saluted Scott in public.^[1] Beverly Burris has suggested that the elitist and even fascist overtones of the technocracy movement undermined its popular appeal as a political movement, and by the mid-1930s the technocracy movement was in decline.^[1]

Energy accounting

At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy".^[2]

Energy Accounting is a hypothetical system of distribution, which would record the energy used to produce and distribute goods and services consumed by citizens in a Technate.^[4] The units of this accounting system would be known as Energy Certificates, or Energy Units. These would replace money in a Technate.^{[citation needed]}

Citizens would generally be physically unable to spend all their energy units because while desire to consume may or may not be infinite, one's actual ability to consume is limited by physical constraints such as the number of hours in a day. Similarly, a person may want many cars, but a person can only drive one car at a time. Unlike traditional money or currencies, energy certificates could not be saved or earned, only distributed evenly among a populace.^{[citation needed]}

Some reasons given for the use of Energy Accounting are, to ensure the highest possible standard of living, as well as equality, among the Technate’s citizenry, as well as prohibit expending resources that go beyond the productive or ecological capacity of the technate.^{[citation needed]}

Energy economics relating to thermoeconomics, is a broad scientific subject area which includes topics related to supply and use of energy. Thermoeconomists argue that economic systems always involve matter, energy, entropy, and information.^[5] Moreover, the aim of many economic activities is to achieve a certain structure. In this manner, thermoeconomics attempts to apply the theories in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, in which structure formations called dissipative structures form, and information theory, in which information entropy is a central construct, to the modeling of economic activities in which the natural flows of energy and materials function to create scarce resources. In thermodynamic terminology, human economic activity may be described as a dissipative system, which flourishes by transforming and exchanging resources, goods, and services.^[6]

Technates

The term Technate was originated by Technocracy Incorporated in the early 1930s to describe the region over which a technocratic society would operate using thermodynamic energy accounting instead of a money method. All resources and industry of this land region would be used to provide an abundance of goods and services, within a sustainable ecological context, to its citizens under the program Energy Accounting.^[4]

The North American Technate is a design and plan to transform North America into a Technocratic society. The plan includes using Canada's rich deposits of minerals and hydro-electric power as a complement to the United States's industrial and agricultural capacity.^{[citation needed]}

The North America Technate would be composed of all of North America, Central America, the Caribbean, parts of South America and Greenland, encompassing some 30 modern nations (as well as numerous Non-Self-Governing Territories). If the Technate were set up today, it would contain nearly 600 million citizens and its total land area would be over 26 million square km (making it the largest nation on Earth).^{[citation needed]} Its territorial claims would stretch from the North Pole in the north, to the Equator in the south and from the Caribbean in the east, to the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean, to the west.^{[citation needed]}

Urbanates

Once a technate has been established, Technocracy Incorporated advocates a form of living environment called urbanates. An Urbanate is essentially an assembly of buildings where people live and work. These places would have all the facilities needed for a community, including schools, hospitals, shopping malls, waste management and recycling facilities, sports centres, and public areas.^{[citation needed]}

Technocrats plan for Urbanates to be something akin to resorts, designed to give each citizen the highest standard of living possible. Getting around in an Urbanate would be inherently easy and efficient.^[7]