The term Technate was originated by Technocracy Incorporated in the early 1930s to describe the region over which a technocratic society would operate using thermodynamic energy accounting instead of a price system (money) method.[1] All resources and industry of this land region would be used to provide an abundance of goods and services, within a sustainable ecological context, to its citizens under the program Energy Accounting.[2]
According to technocrats, a technate cannot simply be set up anywhere like a modern-day country; it has several requirements that must be met in order for it to operate: - There must be sufficient natural resources.
- There must be an existing industrial and scientific base from which to operate the Technate.
- There must be a sufficient amount of trained personnel for its operation.
According to Technocracy Inc., presently the North American continent is known to be able to fully meet the basic requirements needed to operate a Technate, although other land areas could attempt it, with varying results, depending on the required conditions of energy conversion.[3] The design is intended to transform North American society, and replace the current Price system.[4]
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The North American Technate
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The North American Technate is a design and plan to transform North America into a Technocratic society. The plan includes using Canada's rich deposits of minerals and hydro-electric power as a complement to the United States's industrial and agricultural capacity. (Many of the details of this plan are presented in the Technocracy Study Course, the precedent document of the Technocracy movement.) The North America Technate would be composed of all of North America, Central America, the Caribbean, parts of South America, and Greenland, encompassing some 30 modern nations (as well as numerous Non-Self-Governing Territories). If the Technate were set up today, it would contain nearly 600 million citizens and its total land area would be over 26 million square km (making it the largest nation on Earth). Its territorial claims would stretch from the North Pole in the north, to the Equator in the south, and from the Caribbean in the east, to the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean to the west.
Criticisms of the Technocracy Technate conceptEdit
Technocrats would argue that those in power, primarily politicians and boards of corporations, naturally form an organized opposition, since a Technate society would eliminate both the existing political system and the corporate system.Template:Fact
Critics make the following claims regarding the technate design: - There is no possible way to eliminate scarcity of products in modern society and unemployment is not a concern in relation to automation of industry, as other jobs will be created.
- Technocrats, on the other hand, see the current price system as inefficient and wasteful, and argue that the unemployment rate is not an accurate measure of the total number of people working and the amount of work being performed. In the United States, of those of working age, only 65% participate in the economy,[5] while European countries have an even smaller proportion.[6] Moreover, a significant number of employees work in industries such as finance, advertising, and retail. Many of these jobs would disappear after the transition from a monetary economy to a technate design. Furthermore technocrats would claim that purchasing power in a price system is eroded by technology eliminating human labor and hence the underpinning of a consumer money society becomes dysfunctional, as jobs are lost to extraneous energy driven machines.
See alsoEdit
External linksEdit
- Technocracy Incorporated (Official Website)
- Historical Background and Development of Social Security from the U.S. Social Security Administration (see section Technocracy)
- History and Purpose of Technocracy
ReferencesEdit
- ↑ http://telstar.ote.cmu.edu/environ/m3/s3/05account.shtml Environmental Decision making, Science and Technology
- ↑ http://ecen.com/eee9/ecoterme.htm Economy and Thermodynamics
- ↑ Cutler J. Cleveland, "Biophysical economics", Encyclopedia of Earth, Last updated: September 14, 2006.
- ↑ The Energy Certificate essay by Fezer. An article on energy accounting as proposed by Technocracy Inc. http://www.technocracy.org/Archives/The%20Energy%20Certificate-r.htm Article on alternative system to money 'energy accounting'
- ↑ Template:Cite web
- ↑ Template:Cite web
The term Energy Accounting refers to a system of resource allocation proposed by Technocracy Incorporated in the U.S. The system has its basis within the Thermaldynamic interpretation of economics. All human economic activity requires energy. All this energy can be accounted for when we wish to produce goods or monitor resources. In an energy accounting system, the amount of energy needed to produce an item is counted. Thus, the production capacity can be defined in terms of energy and its relation to available resources.
With the sum total of all the energy needed to produce goods known, it is then possible to allocate an equal share of the production capacity to each citizen. In the original proposal put forward by Technocracy Inc, each citizen would receive paper certificates which they could be used to allocate production capacity to produce goods they desire, within an ecologically sustainable context. In a more modern system, the certificates could be replaced by a computer accounting system where each person’s allocation is refer to as energy credits.
Scarcity and Abundance
More recently, money was started to being used, because it simplified exchange and made it more socially secure to trade, due to the fact that money A) is not a good of sustenance, and B) is permanent in nature. The value represented by money is of course also dependent on its relative scarcity in relation to the amount of persons involved in the given market. 
To have general energy accounting imposed upon a given economy, three conditions must be met. There must be enough resource diversity to support a self-sustaining system without the need for exchanging goods and services with the rest of the world; this system must be technologically developed so it can utilise its resources more efficiently than any existing competitor; it would need to have personnel properly educated in managing the system at its disposal. Without these three preconditions fulfilled, a technate cannot be established. Of course, energy accounting would, in a partial, primitive version, be existent in a proto-technate (an expanding network of eco-units run by technocratic principles).
The technate, being self-sustainable and in abundance, would provide everyone of its users with free healthcare, education, elderly-care and travelling.