Earlier in this thread I mentioned “technocracy.” I tracked down that Howard Waldrop story, “You COULD Go Home Again.” (It’s mainly about Thomas Wolfe if he had lived longer.) You can find it in his 1998 collection, “Going Home Again.” Waldrop provides an afterword to the story which explains, among other things, technocracy:
[Technocracy] was the brainchild of a guy named Howard Scott. His idea was simple: build up a database of all the transportation, industrial, electrical, shipping and social engineers in America. Get them ready. When Things Went Blooey (sometime in early 1933, when Hoover was re-elected, it looked like from the summer of 1932), move them in. Get everything back on a supply-need basis; move goods and services from areas of surplus to scarcity; take over vital functions; put people to work on the what-we-would-now-call infrastructure – in some kind of credit arrangement – of all the things that the Depression had knocked the blocks out from under.
It took hold of the imaginations of all kinds of people, not just the poor. It seemed for the first time someone had pointed out that goods and food were still there, just like in 1929, but what was missing was the capital that moved them from one place to another. Replace the capital with brains; and somewhere in there get the exchange part on some other basis: either work credit, or some other funny-money. (One of their neat proposals was to divide the country into sectors by latitude and longitude. I used to write you from Austin, TX, Sector 9830.)
The Technocrats planned and waited. Scott was everywhere that fall and winter. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong for Technocracy. The wheels didn’t come off America. The election came and went. FDR took office. His brain trust did a suck-job on some of the best Technocrat proposals. By early 1933 their time had come, and gone.
There are some still around; they’re awfully old, but for a few minutes there they saw, like Wolfe, the shining, golden opportunity.