In 1932, Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded Technocracy Incorporated. They were one of the first movements to propose energy certificates rather than money as a way to distribute goods and services and to account for the value of labour. Led by “rational” scientists and engineers, the focus of the movement was North America, forming the North American continental “Technate”. In Future My Love we focus on their analysis of the dysfunctional “price system” via an old lecture from the Technocracy archives, and feature current representatives of Technocracy Inc., George Wright & John Darvill, at their headquarters in Ferndale, WA, USA (see website Technocracy Vancouver).
“If this system was operating at maximum efficiency at the lowest possible cost, and to the greatest benefit, the system would collapse. “
The Technocracy movement was highly popular in the USA for a period in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. But in the 1940s interest in the movement declined. Most historians attribute the demise of the Technocracy movement to the rise of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Definition of Technocracy
“The Organization and Membership of Technocracy Inc. define 'Technocracy' as any social system which is organized and integrated on an Area basis to apply the knowledge of science and the methods of technology to the physical operations of the Area, and which has the objective of achieving the highest sustained standard of living for all of its inhabitants that its physical factors permit, and whose ultimate objectives are the production and distribution of abundance.”
“Every problem that we face in society today, what is preventing us from completing it, is money… Why not get rid of it? It’s something we invented - we can just as easy introduce something new. In 1939 it was estimated that people would only need to work 4 hours a day, four days a week for 20 years of their life. You could be consuming a regular 100 Dollar per day, now that is 1939 figures, you can say what that would be now 2 or 3000 Dollars a day, except you wouldn’t have to repay it.”
