Talk:Technocracy (bureaucratic)

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The Criticism section migt be bias against neoclssical models

2/5/07- Replaced a paragraph in Criticism which was, not just arguably biased as mentioned above, but totally inaccurrate -- under the neoclassical model of economics no technocrat ruler would decide to close down a factory; instead the owner would close it down in response to market conditions. I added a paragraph with two examples from the left and right sides of the spectrum criticizing technocracy.

Contents

[edit] Criticism

Someone added some stuff to the 'criticism' section that's way too specific for this particular article (any mention of the 'Technate'). I think there's another 'Technocracy' article on Wikipedia that it belongs in, if not it should probably be deleted or moved.

AustinZ 04:59, 15 May 2007 (UTC)


I think he has a good point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.61.72.172 (talk) 12:54, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bias

I've trimmed up the page to filter clear anti-technocracy bias. The assertion that Technocracy is opposed to democracy and some of the allegations about the nature of technocracy itself were unfounded, and appeared more as propaganda than an objective representation.

Technocracy in and of itself is not opposed to Democracy (though some forms of democracy are incompatible), communism, monarchy, a despotic dictatorship, or a republic. Democratic, monarchial and communist technocracies, aren't only possible, they're all entirely feasible as emergent phenomena in the world today.

~LucaviX

I did a lot of cleaning up, and edited out a lot of bias and correct some grammatical errors. It should be more to the point. -- 67.58.85.208 (talk) 20:17, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What the... this whole article is incorrect

This article does not express what is almost always meant when the word "Technocracy" is used. If the definition used here is legitimate at all, it is a vanishingly insignificant use of the word by a few people in the 1930s. The first sentence is particularly wrong: it is a good description of meritocracy, not technocracy. The overwhelmingly usual meaning is that given by the OED:

The control of society or industry by technical experts; a ruling body of such experts. Technocracy has been the name of various groups advocating the technical control of society, esp. Technocracy, Inc., established in New York in 1932-3 by Howard Scott. 1919 W. H. SMYTH in Industr. Management Mar. 211/2 For this unique experiment in rationalized Industrial Democracy I have coined the term ‘technocracy’. 1932 N.Y. Herald-Tribune 15 Dec. 11/1 Technocracy..the name for a new system and philosophy of government, in which the nation's industrial resources should be organized and managed by technically competent persons for the good of everyone instead of being left to the management of private interests for their own advantage. 1945 C. S. LEWIS That Hideous Strength xii. 318 The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. 1947 Mind LVI. 164 Such notions as social and economic planning, technocracy,..the denial of natural rights and individual liberties, etc., are due to them [sc. French Utopians, St. Simon, etc.] more than to Godwin or the Utilitarians. 1955 Times 23 May 3/4 On the unlikely day when England elects a benevolent technocracy to power a Bill will be passed forbidding more than one performance per year per town of such works as The Messiah, the St. Matthew Passion, [etc.]. 1975 Political Studies XXIII. 82 Nevertheless, if technocracy means rule not just by individuals who are members of a particular technocratic élite, but rule by a technocratic class as such, one has to show that the latter has either a common interest to defend or a common ideology to pursue. Hence {sm}technocrat, (a) an advocate of technocracy; (b) a member of a technocracy, a technologist exercising administrative power; techno{sm}cratic a.; tech{sm}nocratism. 1932 Sun (Baltimore) 12 Dec. 6/3 The Technocrats, thanks..largely to a peculiarly fetching ‘trade label’ which embodies in one word two of the most far-reaching of current concepts, technology and democracy, are succeeding in a remarkable degree in breaking down the apathy. 1932 N.Y. Herald-Tribune 15 Dec. 11/2 The haunts of technocratic science were situated at numerous places about town, principally in cubbyhole restaurants in Greenwich village. 1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 26 Jan. 46/2 An age that was already substituting the technocrat for the monarch. 1945 C. S. LEWIS That Hideous Strength xii. 318 It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad. 1949 Mind LVIII. 416 Lersch denies the widely accepted thesis that man's uniqueness consists in his activities (activism, pragmatism, technocratism) since these are characteristic only of the Male's relation to the world. 1957 London Mag. Jan. 48 Sprawling in my revolving chair, behind a man-sized desk, I could imagine myself a brisk and efficient technocrat, a kind of highbrow tycoon. 1958 Times Lit. Suppl. 26 Dec. 751/1 Either tending towards reliance on a tradition which has been made obsolete..or else attempting a technocratic rule for which no tradition exists. 1965 W. H. G. ARMYTAGE Rise of Technocrats v. 66 St. Simonians were the first technocrats: apostles of the religion of industry. 1974 J. WHITE tr. Poulantzas's Fascism & Dictatorship V. ii. 254 Imperialist ideology in effect represents a displacement of domination within bourgeois ideology itself, from the juridico-political region which was dominant in liberal~bourgeois ideology to economic technocratism. 1980 Times 11 Aug. 11/1 Dr Hoss was chosen after the Syrian~imposed end to the civil war in 1976 to head a ‘technocratic’, ie non-political, government.

I must leave correction of the article to others (gotta run and won't be online for days). JDG 21:56, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Derogatory Usage of Technocrat

Someone has reverted my edit, so instead I'll post the website here until it can be properly added to the article following the sentence, "It should be noted that this opinion is not mainstream among technocrats." Right after this sentence a reference should be cited that I have found and added to the footnotes explaining the mainstream opinion of technocrats. This is the website I wanted to link in the footnotes http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V65-4379FJW-9&_user=783137&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000043272&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=783137&md5=9f390e071bd916535f92611049966dc3. If someone has the technical expertise to add a citation, please do so using this link right after the sentence mentioned above in the 'Derogatory Usage of Technocrat' section. Thank you. Make sure to properly link it from the 'Derogatory Usage of Technocrat' section to the footnotes, and finally to the website. Thank you again. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.230.162.53 (talk) 23:54, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted section on Socialism

It was long and rambling... and totally unsourced. skip sievert (talk) 20:18, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Skip get this through you head once and for all, this article has nothing to do with Technocracy Incorporated, it is about the political use of the term, deleting sections on the basis that they are not "connected to the Technate design" is ludicrous. --Hibernian (talk) 15:44, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

The article is marked to delete un-sourced material. All that section was unreferenced and un-sourced. It did not really seem to be connected to any thing. It was all conflicted statement.skip sievert (talk) 02:08, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't say to delete any unsourced parts, it says they must be cited or be removed. And since the "Citation Needed" tags were only put up a few hours before you deleted it, that's doesn't give a significant amount of time for anyone to be able to source it. Leave it for a few weeks and then, if no one has sourced it, delete it. BTW you specified the reason for deleting it as not being connected to Tech Inc. which is such a basic misunderstanding of the article that it had to be undone. --Hibernian (talk) 09:07, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

It was deleted because it is totally made up of weasel words and conjecture. skip sievert (talk) 15:39, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

I tagged the section. Leave it for a couple of weeks, then dump it in this bit of the talk page. Most of wikipedia is weasel words and conjecture; give the editor who produced that section some time to back up their writing. Fifelfoo (talk) 01:40, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
The section first appeared [1] 23 August 2005, describing French socialist derogatory usages. On 11 March 2006 [User:69.6.104.2] produced much the current version of the section: a [2], to the extent that it discusses abstract relations between "technocracy" and "socialism". Interestingly around early 2006 someone spruiked Skip Sievert's book inappropriately in a series of edits. On 20 May 2006 we won the highly coveted "Unreferenced" template. 6 Feb saw an example with a hypothesised socialist criticism [3]. On 15 May 2007 Skipsievert produced this edit: [4] which, imho, misrepresents the role of pricing in "Actually existing socialist" economics, and softens (by removing) "Most socialists'" criticisms of technocracy. This was reverted 20 May by Hibernian as part of a general revert. Any IP editor produced the "Many Socialists are Technocrats" [5]. Another IP user sees the current section as is come into being[6].
After reading four years of diffs to figure out where the content came from, I can say, this article's quality is low due to lack of citations.Fifelfoo (talk) 02:21, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

You are right. More as to that in a comment about your projected addition to the article. skip sievert (talk) 04:45, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Potential Sources

Smyth, William Henry. "'Technocracy'—Ways and Means to Gain Industrial Democracy," Industrial Management (57) 1919. Stabile, Donald R. "Veblen and the Political Economy of the Engineer: the radical thinker and engineering leaders came to technocratic ideas at the xzame time," American Journal of Economics and Sociology (45:1) 1986, 41-52. Veblen, Thornstein. Engineers and the Price System. New York: Viking Press, 1944. Towne, Henry R. "The Engineer as an Economist," Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1886.

[edit] Proposed new section "The technocratic instinct amongst engineers and its outcomes"

Technocracy is one solution to a problem faced by engineers in the early twentieth century. Following Samuel Haber[1] Donald Stabile argues that engineers were faced with a conflict between physical efficency and cost efficiency in the new corporate capitalist enterprises of the late nineteenth century USA.

Profit-conscious, nontechnical managers of the firm where the engineers work, because of their perceptions of market demand, often impose limits on the projects the engineer desires to undertake; workers do not perform according to the specifications of the engineer's plans; and the prices of all inputs vary with market forces thereby upsetting the engineer's careful calculations. As a result, the engineer loses control over his own little world and must continually revise his plans. To keep his little world secure, the engineer is forced to extend his control over these outside variables and transform them into constant factors.[2]

Engineers heatedly discussed these issues in US engineering journals and proceedings. Three ideological outcomes were produced. Firstly, Taylorism which integrates price structures into engineering concerns, thus producing scientific management where the capitalist manager and engineer divide control over the production process and working class between themselves. Secondly, building on Taylorism the Soviet Union implemented socialist-Taylorism where economic planning, a political bureaucracy and a technical elite divided control over the economy through institutions like the GOELRO plan or five year plans. While political concerns influenced Soviet planning, and engineers were politically persecuted; the political bureaucracy designed plans so as to achieve technical outcomes, and used production price accounting as a technical, rather than economic measure. Finally, in the United States a view that technical concerns should take precedence developed among engineers such as William Howard Smyth based on the early conception of Industrial democracy which was limited merely to the technical government of firms. This school of thought amongst engineers eventually produced social institutions arguing for purely technical government of society in the 1930s. Fifelfoo (talk) 03:48, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

This is rather brilliant. Wow. I would say add it pretty much as is. It covers and incredible amount of ground in informative and accurate and creatively put way. Could you please spend some time on the Technocracy movement article if at all possible and integrate what you are saying above about Smyth and Taylor and Scientific management. That article very much needs some thoughtful editing with the kind of reference tag citations you have accurately added to this one. Regards skip sievert (talk) 04:25, 7 May 2008 (UTC)