this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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I've heard of the general "philosopher king"-type idea, but that website is using it differently. I'll go over it, but it wants a state of post-scarcity before their idea applies, which we of course don't have.
Actually in North America we could have had a working post-scarcity since the 1930s. It is why we had the Great Depression and what Technocracy was designed to be able to handle. It's only been our continued use of a scarcity-based economic system that has been holding back our productive capacity with extreme inefficiencies.
Not sure where you are getting the philosopher king thing from?
How does that work? There almost wasn't enough food to go around in the great depression, and plastic was an advanced new material hard to come by from the 40's through the 60's. Electronics took a long time to be produced in any significant quantity too. And what about land?
Plato said everything would be great if we had the smartest people in charge. He called it the philosopher king, others call it technocracy. In ancient Greece I probably would have thought it makes good sense.
In practice, thousands of years on, I think history has shown that there were always smart people and good ideas around; the shortage was of incentive for those with power to implement them, instead of just entrenching and enriching themselves.
Oh there was plenty of food to go around, the problem was that the system couldn't make it "go around". Either people were too poor to be able to afford it (all the unemployment back then) or companies couldn't sell it for enough to stay in business. That was the problem: we were suddenly able to produce so much that the prices fell too low (in conjunction with decreased demand due to lower purchasing power) to sell it. This was precisely the problem Technocracy was developed to address. An economic system based on scarcity cannot distribute an abundance of goods and services, so either you use a system designed to actually do that (Technocracy), or you get rid of the abundance and keep the old system. Guess which we did. So crops were burned, livestock slaughtered, even weird stuff like pouring oil on oranges so no one could eat them. Get rid of the abundance, and prices go back up. Then we pumped money into the system so that people could afford to buy that scarcity again with the New Deal, subsidies to farmers, and good ol' WWII helped a lot too.
I'm not talking about an abundance of every little thing, but rather what essentially gives a high standard of living: food, shelter, transportation, etc. We could have given everyone on the continent a much better life than was typical for the day. We have enough natural resources and technology to do that (although that won't remain true forever).
Ah I see. Yeah, the term "technocracy" does get used to describe different things. What I'm talking about is a very specific proposal developed in the 1920s to address the problems of high production in a scarcity economy.
Well, if you're talking about just food, shelter, and some very basic kind of transportation (no planes!), sure, there's no scarcity. That's a very low bar, though, and most people don't want to live at the subsistence level.
Can you link to the original proposal, so I know what we're talking about?
No, I mean a high standard of living, according to what is possible at the time. Good homes, plenty of good food, easy transportation wherever you want to go in the country, etc.
I can get you the older stuff sure, but it was written for a different audience. You'll most likely do better with a starting point like this.
I guarantee there's more people who might like to travel than planes and fuel to move them. Expanding the sector requires a variety of inputs, which themselves are in shortage.
Please do. I did read through that page and a few other places on the website. It explains that it's a new economic system, but not how it works.
There will always be some things that will be scarce, yes, like say space travel, that will have to be dealt with by other means. The point is that there are more than enough other things that can be provided in abundance to give everyone a high standard of living. And once the inefficiencies of the current system are removed, even many scarce things (like air travel) will be far more available than they are now.
There are a couple pages that go over the basics (e.g. The Energy Certificate), but if you want more details I just need a way to get a couple of pdfs to you.
Eh, never mind. I don't really have an email attached to this account, and I'm not invested enough to set something up just for this. Where's the Energy Certificate page? It looks like that's one of the things that's not linked to during the reconstruction.
The Energy Accounting page is under Technocracy Fundamentals on the beginner's page. The Energy Certificate one is much longer and older (for example paper certificates would no longer be used today). I checked and the links work for both.
The other two more comprehensive docs I mentioned should be available now under Technocracy In Print (links are towards the end of their respective descriptions). Let me know if you need any more help or have questions.
Ah, I see. You might want to make fundamentals it's own page. Or at least make links a different colour from plain text.
Yeah, we're working on that.