| Lectures influenced | Thorstein Veblen |
| Influenced by | Technocracy Movement |
| Start Date | 1925-00-00 |
| Notes | Technocracy was a political-economic movement headed by Howard Scott and based upon some ideas of the economist Thorstein Veblen. It created a sensation over a six month period in 1932-33. Apparently Howard Scott attended a series of lectures by Thorstein Veblen given in the mid to late 1920's before Veblen died in 1929. A group of science-and-engineering-oriented people in New York City decided to undertake a survey of energy use in the United States and document the relation of energy use and economic growth. This survey was undertaken in 1931 and 1932 and Howard Scott joined the group and soon became its spokesman. 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. |