Politically unbiased experts in red-and-gray Technocracy uniforms would assay each nation’s yearly energy output, then divide it fairly among the citizenry, each person receiving an allocation of so many joules or kilowatt-hours per month. If people wanted to buy, say, shirts, they would look up the price on a table of energy equivalents calculated by objective Technocratic savants.
My high school history/economics teacher actually assigned me to study the Technocracy Movement, I suspect because he wanted me to be more skeptical of mainstream economics, or at least the more technocratic parts, like central banking, monetary/fiscal/industrial policies, etc. (He favored Austrian economics himself.) Now, this history is more salient to me as yet another cautionary tale about the general unreliability of human reasoning.
But the idea that it could be achieved centrally by the elites held much less sway, and there was a major new element of distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress—an element that has not gone away, and indeed by today has gone mainstream.
Elites are probably better at reasoning than the average person, but still not good enough to foresee and prevent the negative side effects of progress (or cultural and technological change, to use a more neutral phrase). Given this, “distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress” seem totally understandable. It’s hard for me to see how this can change in a sustainable way, unless we get better at reasoning itself. (I say “sustainable” because people might temporarily become bullish about progress again, by forgetting that we’re not very good at reasoning about social problems.)
My high school history/economics teacher actually assigned me to study the Technocracy Movement, I suspect because he wanted me to be more skeptical of mainstream economics, or at least the more technocratic parts, like central banking, monetary/fiscal/industrial policies, etc. (He favored Austrian economics himself.) Now, this history is more salient to me as yet another cautionary tale about the general unreliability of human reasoning.
Elites are probably better at reasoning than the average person, but still not good enough to foresee and prevent the negative side effects of progress (or cultural and technological change, to use a more neutral phrase). Given this, “distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress” seem totally understandable. It’s hard for me to see how this can change in a sustainable way, unless we get better at reasoning itself. (I say “sustainable” because people might temporarily become bullish about progress again, by forgetting that we’re not very good at reasoning about social problems.)