Technocracy and Poverty

Extract

The word is dead, but the thing is alive and growing. According to an American observer, Technocracy has made an impression; it went straight down through the layers of society to the very bottom. It may be dead at the top, but at the bottom it will live on. The organisation named Technocracy has been discredited, almost entirely on a question of personalities and and errors in incidental statistics. The popular press has turned to other stunts. Nevertheless there is a growing tendency among intelligent people to enquire if the consequence of plenty is really starvation, to what extent the present ‘economic crisis’ is natural and how much of it arises from stupidity. As the rising tide of bankruptcies reaches the professional classes, so an increased interest in economics is aroused in a section of society which has long been remarkable in England for ‘this gift of moving in a region other than that of logic.’ The broadcast emotion of a Prime Minister specially elected to put things right, is ceasing to reassure or even to interest a nation, which for a year and a half was instructed to save what it had not got and is now being urged to spend the proceeds of this thrift. In sheer desperation the nation is beginning to think for perhaps the first time since the Reform Bill.