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The Technocracy Study Course is a book published by Technocracy Incorporated in 1934 that formed the basis of the Technocracy movement. The Technical Alliance was formed in conjunction with the Industrial Engineering Department at Columbia University, and began an empirical analysis of production and employment in North America in energy units. This information was then published as the Technocracy Study Course.

The term 'technology' became widely used after the early-twentieth-century rise of "technocracy," a movement that promoted technical superiority by seeking to replace the subjectivity of politics by the assumed objectivity of engineering.The term “technocracy,” coined in 1919, came into vogue in the 1930s as rational, centralized planning came to be seen as the antidote for the woes of the Depression.

M. King Hubbert a geo-scientist was also an avid Technocrat. He co-founded Technocracy Incorporated with Howard Scott and contributed significantly to the Technocracy Study Course, the precedent document of that group which advocates a Non-market economics form of Energy accounting,in constrast to the current Price System method. Hubbert was a member of the Board of Governors, and served as Secretary of education to that organisation

History

Willard Gibbs developed a 'Theory of Energy Determinants' also referred to as vector analysis which according to Howard Scott, formed the basis of determining the operational dynamic of functional social design on a continental scale of magnitude for North America. Gibbs thermodynamic approach led to the concepts of Energy accounting as conceived by the Technical Alliance. Scott referred to Gibbs as the person that made possible the concept of energy economics using Energy accounting in a technate design.The design using energy economics as proposed by this group is located in the last two chapters of the book. Much of the rest of the book is basic information about science and different aspects of research and data collecting, and also examples of how a Price system works, and possible alternatives.

Technical Alliance project

The Technical Alliance measured and assessed the extent of the land's natural resources of soil, metals, fuels, hydrology and its energy resources, its transport and communications and construction capabilities, its industrial and technological productive capacity, its available scientific, engineering, biological trained personnel--all to determine whether the area of North America could provide an equitably individualized high optimum standard of living for its population, and if so, how this could be brought about in the form of a governing body which they later referred to as a technate.

M. King Hubbert, a later member of the Technical Alliance collated most of the information for teaching the principles of the movement: the Technocracy Study Course.

...'I drew up a kind of a small study course of the basics of what we were talking about, for use in these small groups that were assembling around. That was published in a small booklet without authorship. It was called Technocracy Study Course'

The movement grew rapidly and as a mass-movement its real center was California where it claimed half a million members in 1934. Technocracy counted among its admirers such men as the novelist H.G. Wells, the author Theodore Dreiser and the economist Thorstein Veblen.

In the Technocracy Study Course M. King Hubbert called economists apologists for businessmen. More recently Howard T. Odum charged that "...the economists have not been educated in energetics and therefore have not understood the second law of energy (Thermodynamics) and the fact that energy is not reused." Science writer Malcolm Slesser criticized economists, since they "tend to take technological progress for granted as if they could buy their way around the laws of thermodynamics." Hence, antipathy toward economists is common both to Technocrats and net energy analysts.

Excerpt from the Technocracy Study Course

... 'The physical expansion of industry was, in a period from the Civil War to the World War, a straight compound interest rate of growth at about 7 per cent per annum. During that period, the debt structure was also extending at a similar rate of increment. Since the World War . . . the rate of physical expansion has been declining, and physical production has been progressively leveling off. Thus, for the period prior to the World War there was a close correspondence between the rate of growth of the debt structure, and of the physical industrial structure. Since the World War, while the physical structure has been leveling off in its growth, the debt structure, not being subject to the laws of physics and chemistry, has continued to expand until now the total long- and short-term debts are only slightly less than the entire wealth, or monetary value of all the physical equipment. As time progresses this discrepancy between the rate of growth of the physical equipment and that of debt must become greater, instead of less. The implications of this will be interesting to consider'... end.