Technocratic Pyrotechnics

I

‘ ONE man at a switchboard! ’ That slogan of Howard Scott, the Chief Technocrat, has kept me awake nights. ‘Just imagine,’he says, ‘a New Jersey rayon factory without human labor, save for one man at a switchboard!’ Such a spectacle is a warning that nearly all of us will soon be thrown out of work.

Already the Technocrats have made 300 charts to prove it. These charts show that we have engines with 9,000,000 times the output of the average human being, working eight hours a day; and of this 9,000,000-fold acceleration, 8,766,000-fold has occurred since the year 1900. The Technocrats are now making more charts, 3000 of them — or 3,000,000, I can’t remember which. Long rows of ciphers don’t mean much to me.

Anyway, when the 3000 or the 3,000,000 charts are finished, they will render speechless all the politicians, including Huey Long; and the Technocrats will then take over the control of the country. Under the new régime, nobody will have to work except persons between the ages of 25 and 45; and they will have to work only 132 hours per year. That will be sufficient to maintain twice as high a standard of living as that reached in the year 1929. Think of it! When the Technocratic calendar is adopted, instead of having sixteen holidays, and all the rest workdays, we shall have sixteen workdays, and all the rest holidays.

This reveals the basic truth that physical wealth is not measured in terms of money or labor, but in terms of energy. And with the discovery of that truth, as Howard Scott profoundly says, ‘the bankers, the industrialists, the Marxists, the Fascists, the economists, the soldiers, as well as the politicians, are things of the past.’

‘A clean sweep,’ my friend Slocum says. ‘Nobody left but the Technocrats. The great flood of invention is rising, and not even two of a species will be saved this time!’

That is the trouble with Slocum: he refuses to take anything seriously. Still I keep discussing the economic muddle with him, because he works on statistics in my office.

Most economists don’t know enough to answer the Technocrats, so they make fun of them. Technocratic fiction, George Soule says, is a new kind of bedtime story, to give children pleasant dreams while the house is burning down. The Technocrats are intellectual terrorists, Virgil Jordan says, proclaiming the Technocrack of Doom. Simeon Strunsky sees the chief Technocrat as nothing but the Fat Boy in Pickwick who sets out to make our flesh creep. He is not an engineer, with a 300,000-horsepower turbine to operate, but just a plain human being, with that most primitive of all human tools — an axe to grind.

Well, let the economists laugh while they may. They will soon be discarded, Howard Scott predicts, along with other historical antiquities. What have economists ever done for their country, anyway — what, except write books for each other, explaining why nothing can ever be done about anything? Leave natural law alone to work out our problems for us. No wonder that is a popular plan. Somebody observed long ago that the most powerful impulse of the human race is the instinct to sit down. The Technocrats have made us sit up.

It is startling to hear Howard Scott say that ‘the progression of a modern industrial social mechanism is undirectional and irreversible.’ I did n’t know exactly what that meant, but Slocum says it means that we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way.

Slocum is clever enough and well informed; but he is not an engineer, so he simply cannot comprehend the revolutionary nature of this new science. ‘Old stuff,’he calls it. He seems to think the country has gone Technocrazy. ‘The Technocrats,’ he said the other day, ’have filled our economic cornfields with scarecrows. Yet there is nothing new about them; the same old figures, dangling on sticks. They are clad with grandfather’s discarded suits, threadbare, full of holes, and stuffed with statistical straw that has been kicked around the barn floor for a long time. Still, under the pale moonlight, the rustling of the straw-stuffed limbs in the wind startles us.'

‘ It certainly does,’I murmured. ‘ One man at a switchboard!’

‘That is a shocking thought,’exclaimed Slocum, with a grin.

II

For my part, I can’t see anything funny about it. ‘Be serious for once, Slocum,’ I begged, ‘and hear what the Technocrats say. Remember, too, that they have reached these conclusions only after ten years of chart making. They declare that displacement of man-hours by kilowatt-hours is inevitable, and that unemployment must increase in geometrical progression, unless we abolish capitalism. What do you make of that?’

‘Fireworks,’ he grunted. ‘Technocratic pyrotechnics.’

‘But,’ I objected, ‘Howard Scott has proved that the whole price system is crumbling under the tense pressure of immense energy and power. Now honestly, Slocum, is n’t that revolutionary ? ’

‘ No more so than a pinwheel. Everything Scott says goes round and round, emitting sparks, and then stops where it started. He is a pseudo-scientist using the methods of a psycho-showman.’

I did my best to get Slocum to see the tragic import of the facts. ‘You don’t seem to realize,’ I said, ‘that your own job is doomed by the machine. Even to-day, a single turbine has a capacity of 300,000 horsepower. That is three million times the output of a human being, working eight hours a day. But a turbine runs twenty-four hours a day; and forty of these turbines have the energy output of ten times all the adult workers of the United States.’

Slocum interrupted me. ‘Then,’he concluded, ‘all our workers must have been displaced by machines already, for already the equivalent of more than forty of these turbines is at work.’

‘You don’t understand,’I answered as patiently as I could. ‘Men are still employed in some industries because the maximum displacement by machinery has not yet been reached, and some men are still employed to tend machines. The next step, the Chief Technocrat says, will be to install machines to tend machines.'

Slocum wanted to know whether the next step would be to install machines to tend the machines that were tending the machines, and then to install machines that would make machines to tend the machines which were tending the machines.

Ignoring his irrelevant question, I went on to explain that one man with a machine can now produce 9000 times as many electric light bulbs as one man could produce by hand in 1914.

‘But,’ he objected, ‘if the Technocrats could be induced to consult the standard work on the subject — Real Wages, by Paul H. Douglas — they would find that, between 1899 and 1913, output per man-hour, in all industries combined, increased no faster than 2 per cent per year. Nothing startling about the figure 2 — unless you add a few irresponsible ciphers. That is n’t all. Douglas shows that, between 1913 and 1921, output per man-hour remained about the same, while inventions swamped the Patent Office. As a matter of fact, Carl Snyder exploded the myth of vastly increased world production, even before the Technocrats exploded their first skyrocket.’

Slocum took out his notebook. ‘Here are a few figures,’ he said, ‘which show exactly how fast invention has reduced employment. The first spinning machines enabled one person to spin as much cloth as 700 could spin by hand. But did the machines throw 699 out of every 700 out of work? Not exactly. In 1835, employment in the British textile industry was 218,000. More efficient machines were then installed. Employment rose to 379,000. Still better machines were put in operation. Employment rose to 689,000.’

I was about to raise the objection that a single industry may not be typical, but Slocum continued reading his notes. They show that total employment in England during the most prolific era of invention, just prior to the World War, rose 48 per cent, while the population rose only 38 per cent.

‘Why worry about machines?’ Slocum continued. ‘They produce jobs as well as goods. That is what they did in the United States between 1919 and 1928. They made so much work in connection with airplanes, automobiles, trucks, radios, motion pictures, and electric refrigerators, that they offset all the technological unemployment in all the other industries combined. The Department of Commerce statistics show it.’

Slocum warned me not to pursue the inquiry any further if I wanted to be thrilled by Technocratic fireworks.

That set me thinking. It would take a thousand patient monks a lifetime to produce one issue of the Atlantic with quill pens, even if they failed to observe union hours. Yet there are more printers at work per thousand of population to-day than there were scribes at work before the day of printing presses. And surely there are more taxicab drivers in New York City, alone, than there were hackney coachmen in the whole country before Henry Ford began inventing things.

Still that is not the whole story. ‘Slocum,’ I asked, ‘do you realize that the Technocrats announce that a roadmaking machine is now possible which could tear up and repave Fifth Avenue from one end to the other in twentyfour hours, and that one of these machines could do seven blocks in one hour, and four machines could — well, let’s do a little figuring.’

‘Yes,’ Slocum agreed, ‘let’s do it. If one motor car can cross the continent in four days, then four motor cars can cross the continent in one day. And if one man, using the latest Super House Constructor, can build a house in ten days, then ten men can build a house in one day; a thousand men can build a house in fourteen minutes; and a million men can build a house in eight tenths of a second. The Technocrats are right; economics is obsolete; noththing can be trusted but mathematics.’

III

‘Houses are different,’ I objected. ‘See what has happened in the steel industry. Do you question Howard Scott’s figures? He says that in 1900 the steel industry produced 11,000,000 metric tons, with 600,000,000 manhours; but in 1929 it produced 58,000,000 metric tons with only 770,000,000 man-hours — a drop from 70 manhours per ton to 13 man-hours per ton.

‘By analogy,’ I pointed out, ‘you can easily see what the development of energy will do to employment in other fields. At that rate, in another thirty years only one worker out of nine will be employed. You can learn a lot by analogy.’

‘You certainly can,’ Slocum agreed. ‘For instance, there is the flea. It jumps 1300 times its own length. There is no reason, therefore, why a man six feet high should not develop power enough to jump — let me see — well, at least a mile and a half at one leap.’

‘But,’ I objected, ‘jumping is not solely a question of physical power.’

‘Neither is employment in a thousand vocations,’said Slocum. ‘A single turbine, for all I know, may have a capacity of 300,000 horsepower. But all the turbines in the world cannot develop even one horsepower capacity for teaching school, or editing a newspaper, or creating beauty, or caring for the sick, or governing a city, or ministering to human souls who are weary and heavy-laden. The services we most need are individualistic by nature; they cannot be furnished by mass production.’

I had to admit that there was something to that argument; one man at a switchboard could not write poems, or fill teeth, or discover the cause of cancer.

‘Or even,’ Slocum added, ‘run the Technocrat’s publicity bureau. That requires something besides turbines: that requires fireworks.’

Slocum insists that, from all their charts, the Technocrats fail to draw one obvious conclusion — namely, that we should very greatly increase the proportion of our national income, and thus the proportion of employed workers, devoted to the production of services. We could easily, he admits, produce things three times as fast. There is, to be sure, a bare possibility that we could not spin our machinery around 3000 times as fast; perhaps the Technocrats have misplaced a few ciphers. But certainly we could spin it around three times as fast. There is no point, however, in producing three times as many coats, cameras, cabbages, cigarettes, and commodities in general. Why not go in for the durable satisfactions of life? There is no danger of an overproduction of physical health; no danger of an excess of fine arts; no danger of learning too much about the fine art of living. Nobody fears a glut in the market for education. And none of these services can be rendered by machines.

Then, again, as Slocum pointed out, the Technocrats allow their conclusions to get the better of their mathematics — which is a casual thing for engineers to do. They play up a single machine, used in only one out of a thousand farm operations, and leave us gasping over the spectacle of a machine doing the work — all the work — of 3000 farmers. More fireworks! If the Technocrats had n’t announced that they will refuse to bother to answer criticisms, I should ask them how one farmer on a giant harvester can contrive to prune trees, doctor cattle, collect eggs, analyze soil, repair windmills, and keep cashbooks, to say nothing of keeping the farm hands contented. It appears that there are better places to study farming than New York City.

Thinking all this over afterward, I became less excited over Technocratic Pyrotechnics. It really is difficult to see how one man at a switchboard could pick raspberries. Perhaps Slocum is partly right, after all. He says the Technocrats set out to produce screen tragedies, but they turned out to be animated cartoons.

IV

The Technocrat’s proposal to abolish money, however, is another matter; so the next day, when I met Slocum on the train, I reminded him that the 300 charts of the Technocrats prove that the whole price system has broken down under the impact of technology, and money is obsolete.

‘It soon will be, at the present rate,’ Slocum replied. ‘Money in circulation and bank deposits have fallen off more than twelve billions, and what money is left has adopted the share-the-work programme. But what of it? It is also true that only one blast furnace out of four is now in operation. Does that prove that blast furnaces are obsolete, or does it prove that they produce no pig iron when you don’t use them?’

I suggested that the use of money might be shrinking because money is useless as a measure of value. ‘You must admit,’ I argued, ‘that energy is the basis of all wealth. Money has nothing to do with it: money is not wealth. How, then, can you measure worth by money?’

‘Lend me five dollars,’ he said, ‘and I will demonstrate.’

I refused to be diverted. ‘Take the current issue of the Atlantic,’ I said. ‘How much is it worth? Forty cents, you say. That shows that you don’t know anything about it. You are confused by the price system. How can you measure worth without a fixed unit of measurement? The basic question is how much energy it took — how many ergs — to produce the magazine.’

‘I see,’ said Slocum. ‘All you have to do to find the real worth is to figure out how many ergs it took to write the leading article; how many ergs it took to attach rejection slips to all the leading articles that were restored to circulation; how much power was consumed in cutting the trees which furnished the pulp which went into the paper which was fed to the machines of the Rumford Press. And so on into the night. By the time you have added all the ergs, you will know exactly how much one copy of the Atlantic is worth. But by that time you won’t care. Your only problem will be how to develop enough ergs to escape from your padded cell.’

You can’t reason with a man who talks that way, any more than you can reason with Voliva. Slocum thinks the world of business must be a money world, because he has never seen any other kind.

When I told him that, he asked. ‘Well, then, how much is a magazine worth that nobody will read? How much is a woman’s hat worth, pre-war model? Can you figure that out with an ergometer? Technology can do wonders. It can make a million hats an hour which will wear twenty years, but it can’t make one woman who will wear a hat twenty years.’

Such remarks show how hard it is for a man to shake himself loose from the superstitions of the price system. Of course there will be no mistakes when the Technocrats decide what is to be produced: all decisions will be mathematically correct. Worth will be measured in ergs. ‘Technocracy will smash the price system!’

That dazzling skyrocket, Slocum says, was set off to startle an already awe-struck world. And the world gasped! But Slocum wants to know why the price system was not smashed long ago? Invention has put so many ergs to work, he says, that already modern man’s productive capacity is at least a hundred times greater than that of primitive man. If the price system can stand up under that, why not under twice as much smashing? Or three times as much?

I wonder what the answer to that question is. For my part, I can’t even see how we are going to buy things with ergs, after the Technocrats have abolished money. I have heard it said that the ancients used cows for money; but cows have gone out of circulation. They were not easy for ladies to take along when they went shopping, and it was not easy to make change — not, at least, without damage to the cows. But how can you make change with ergs, and how can you spend them at the corner store, and how can you send them to Brazil in payment for coffee? And how can you make out a pay roll, in terms of ergs or joules or calories, to pay the architect who made the plans for the Empire State Building — now, alas, called the Empty State Building — and to pay Al Smith for the countless weary days and, one suspects, sleepless nights which he has spent in vain attempts to rent the offices? A circus manager in Budapest has just paid his municipal taxes with seven lions and thirteen apes, but how could he pay his taxes with seven ergs and thirteen joules? That is not at all clear to me.

It is hard enough to translate Technocratic language into English, but it is harder still to translate kilowatts into office work. There is the case of Valeska Becker, for example, the typist who attended the meeting of the First Humanist Society in New York and dropped in the contribution box a promise to give to the cause of humanism twenty kilowatts of her energy. Now twenty kilowatts equal about fifteen horsepower; that is easy enough to figure. But how much typing can fifteen horses do? The First Humanist Society cannot collect Miss Becker’s contribution until it figures that out.

V

After all, there may be causes of this depression which do not appear in the 300 charts, and which would not appear in 3,000,000 charts of the same sort. Perhaps there is more to mankind than machinery. There are states of mind, for example, not yet measurable in terms of ergs. Then, too, there is the Smoot Tariff of Ill-Will. (Would that lame-duck tariffs went into oblivion with lame-duck Senators!) Then, again, once upon a time there was a World War. And somewhere I have read that corporation profits increased 39 per cent from 1927 to 1929, and that the people who wanted to spend more did not obtain enough money, and the people who did n’t want to spend more tried to save too much. Have the Technocrats heard of any of these economic dislocations? Apparently not.

The basis of Technocracy, however, is clear enough. Everybody knows that it is possible to measure energy in units of work — the erg and the joule — or in units of heat — the calorie. Now an erg is always the same thing.

A dollar may be worth, in buying power, as Howard Scott says, ‘so much to-day and more or less to-morrow, while an erg is the same thing in 1900, 1929, 1933, or the year 2000.’

Even so, Slocum asserts, the erg has nothing on the gold dollar. A gold dollar also is the same thing in 1900, 1929, 1933, or the year 2000. It is always 25.8 grains of gold. But the fact that the dollar is always the same thing does not make it always the same in purchasing power. How then, Slocum asks, can the erg remain the same in purchasing power?

I am sure I don’t know; but the Technocrats must know, for they have made 300 charts. As I said before, I am a dub on the economic golf links, with a handicap of fifty. The very thought of money is a mental hazard. When it comes to trying to figure out why we don’t provide ourselves with enough money to buy what we can easily make and eagerly want, I slice every shot and soon lose the ball.

I can’t even see how the Share-theWork Movement answers the challenge of the Technocrats. How can two men, with ten dollars of wages divided between them, buy any more than one man with ten dollars all his own? But somehow they can: the great bankers of the twelve Federal Reserve Banking and Industrial Committees say so. They assure us that sharing the work will inevitably result in increased buying — an acceleration of consumption.’ Mr. Hoover goes even further. He says that nothing we could do at this time would so greatly accelerate our progress. And an engineer — static or technocratic — must know all about acceleration.

What confuses me is that when we come to money problems arithmetic goes back on us. Ten dollars are ten dollars; but somehow five plus five are much more. Perhaps that explains what has always puzzled me: how a city saves money by cutting down its school expenses ten thousand dollars, and then adding five thousand for poor relief and five thousand for the care of criminals. That must explain, too, why the sales tax and the farm allotment plan go so well together. All we have to do, it seems, is to take a billion dollars from buyers in taxes on sales, and hand the billion to the farmers. Then the people will have a billion dollars more to spend, and business will boom. Where will the extra billion come from? I can’t make that out. The Technocrats are as easy for me to understand as the Democrats.

The plan of the Democrats, Slocum says, is simple enough. All you have to do is to stock a nice large island with cats and rats; skin the cats and feed the bodies to the rats; skin the rats and feed the bodies to the cats; and there you are, all set up in the fur business!

As for Technocracy, I don’t see how machines can ruin us, if only we provide ourselves with money enough to buy what the machines produce. The price system works well enough, as long as we have the price. It worked well enough from 1923 to 1929. Money is not obsolete; just now, however, it is not obtainable. But a dearth of money is not an act of God: it is an act of our banking system. We, ourselves, made the system. We shall probably make a better one as soon as we learn to think straight about what ails us.

‘That’s the discouraging thing,’ I said to Slocum. ‘Everybody is turning to the Technocrats to show us the way out, but we are n’t getting out.’

‘That is what the church in Memphis seems to think,’ Slocum replied. ‘Did n’t you read the announcement? The Reverend Mr. Holcomb will preach on the question, “What are we learning from this depression?” and the choir will sing, “Search me, O God.”’

That is the trouble with Slocum. He never takes anything seriously.