Thinking About Technocracy

Is here…

HT to FutureGov / Dominic Campbell

Find it here.

It takes very little argument to persuade that money is a means governance.  It settles who commands resources, who has certain liberties, and who can take certain actions.  Looking back over the last few thousand years, we have lived in an Age of Money as Means of Governance.   So why would this Age come to an end?

Money as a means of governance requires several social facts to be in place:

1. Money users must trust that the money used has value to obtain desired things.

2. Money can be “owned” and stored.

3. Money must have a certain rarity. 

The art and science of acting in the Age of Money as a Means of Governance is essentially the field of economics.  The field assumes that most actions are governed by money or value-related considerations and these considerations can be discreetly analyzed based on predicted rational (or irrational) operations.

I think we then look to problems with economics as a way to determine why and how the Age of Money as a Means of Governance begins to end.  What are the plausible issues with money? 

First, there is rarity.  If the production of money cannot be controlled, it is of declining value.  Money systems where value declines at a certain pace are like dishes that leak.  Their function is denigrated by the rate of decline.   People who worry about “fiat” money are particularly obsessed with this issue.  

Second there is storage.  Storage requires safety which implies insurance, time value/interest rates and all that entails.  Ownership of course leads to estates, probates, bankruptcies, etc. 

Third is trust.  Can I get the safety, permanance, continuity, stability, etc. that I want for the currency I store at some point in the future?  This issue is the prime motivator of governance in our Age. 

So we need to consider, are these items under threat?

Michel Blauwens publishes a critical comment on, and a quote and link for this essay:  Ronfeldt, David and Varda, Danielle,The Prospects for Cyberocracy (Revisited)(December 1, 2008).

From Leonardo Energy…here.

I got this via a blurb at BreakthroughAlerts.com.  It’s published at ICT Results and covers the seemingly rapid rise of the eTEN system.  While the hosannas are rolling in, I must say that nothing about eTEN strikes me as particularly new or interesting.  They have systemized their product quite well into something governments can absorb and purchase.  Whether that is good or bad depends on one’s perspective.  Maybe I’m being too snarky about this.  Product use often leads to open systems copies and broader acceptance even if the sort of product developed was originally more along open access lines.

Web Urbanist covers 15 space projects for now and the near future.  I’d like to see more along the lines of practical outcomes, but I’m on board for much bigger attempts going into space…especially with more than one flag on the ships.

Asia Sentinel carries a Sarajit Majumdar article on the seeming power shift from West to East.  It’s happening at an accelorated pace to be sure, but Majumdar, like so many other economists, see technocrats as anti-liberty boogeymen.  Perhaps they are.  What never seems to come from the economist’s pen is the implicit political assumptions they make that are essential to their worldview.  Indeed economics is always political economy.  The underspoken deserves greater fleshing out.  Where are their boundaries?  What is a sine qua non of their liberty systems?  Human rights?  Free trade?  What about Singapore?  Switzerland?  Free?  Why or why not?  Economics seems to run from the discussion of necessary foundations.  As a science, that makes it weaker.

I follow some of the big academic presses for reasons that sometimes escape me.  Oxford and Harvard are big enough that they are usually exciting in some way over a period of time.  One example is a current post on the history of medicine (really public health) in a new book by OUP.  I think I’ll check it out.  Finding origins of technocracy (a word I understand that arose in the 1930s) would be worth more of my time.  I’ve always been interested in public administration history, but that’s become something of a moribund pursuit.

Medicine and associate fields are invariably the domains where technocracy is most accepted.  Environmentalism and civil engineering follow I think.  Banking and financial regulations fall a distant third/fourth.

Today’s NY Times advocates a 50 year farm bill in an opinion piece by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry.  It’s a good proposal.  Their ideas and concerns are spot on.  Here’s why it won’t happen:

America is perhaps further from being a technocracy than any developed country on earth.  In other words, America hates the long-term plan and the ideals necessary to make long-term plans work.  That ethos hasn’t been around Washington in more than 4 decades. 

We’ve seen instead a Washington focused on the individual and on advancement of advantage for the quick and nimble.  In short, it’s been an economy of exploitation.  That works fairly well when resources are available, bulldozing is easy, and regions can develop out of synch with each other and still carry the national tax needs through diversification. 

When larger technical issues such as global warming, Internet advances, globalized securities markets and rapid global sophistication (in general) take hold, it’s much harder to run a slash and burn economy to any sort of consistent success.  Indeed, the prospects of painful and spectacular crashes are most likely heightened due to the velocity necessary to enable creative destruction at the scale of today’s world.  

The sort of farm bill envisioned by Jackson and Berry is infeasible because the US is not structured to enable and manage long-term social contracts.  No one trusts the plans made and the structures created won’t be plundered in the future… just as no one trusts the institutional staying power of large corporations for similar reasons–they tend to get plundered by their management of all the available value just as soon as management can develop a suitable scheme to pay itself the lot.