Energy Survey of North America

The Energy Survey of North America was carried out using facilities at Columbia University. Being engineers the people looked at physical measures of production and productivity and were distrustful of quantities involving prices. Howard Scott reported on some of the Survey's "findings" to the American Statistical Association in June of 1932 and that presentation was reported on by The New York Times. One "finding" reported was that industrial employment had reached a maximum in 1919 but such employment was declining all the while industrial production was continuing to grow. This raised the specter of technological progress creating increased productivities such that less labor was needed to produce more output and that the economic system of the time could not cope with this productivity growth. Thorstein Veblen in his book, The Engineers and the Price System advocated taking the management of the economy out of the hands of business people and putting it into the hands of engineers. Veblen's proposal looked remarkably like what people thought was taking place in the Soviet Union. After the New York newspapers reported on the Energy Survey and the movement that followed from it the wire services spread the story around the country. The American psyche was desperate for a cogent explanation of why the country had gone from unpresidented prosperity to hard times. This movement, which adopted the name Technocracy, seemed to have a scientific answer. Time Magazine ran an article on Technocracy; other magazines picked upon the theme. https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/technocracy.htm