Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Skipsievert (talk | contribs) at 00:46, 6 July 2008 (article reference citation). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The term Technate was originated by Technocracy Incorporated, in the early 1930's to describe the region over which a technocratic society would operate. All resources and industry of this land region would be used to provide an abundance of goods and services, within an ecological context, to its citizens under the program Energy Accounting.

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.

1. There must be sufficient natural resources to create an abundance.
2. There must be an existing industrial and scientific base from which to create the Technate.
3. 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. The design is intended to transform North American society, and end the current Price system.

The North American Technate

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 concept

Technocrats themselves would argue that those in power, politicians and boards of corporations, are a form of organized opposition as a Technate design eliminates a Political system and the corporate system also.

Critics make the following claims regarding technocracy:

• 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, while European countries have an even smaller proportion. 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, meaning that the "adjusted" unemployment rate (a measure excluding such pecuniary jobs) is much higher than indicated. 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.

External links

• 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

References

1. http://ecen.com/eee9/ecoterme.htm Economy and Thermodynamics
2. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Biophysical_economics Biophysical economics - Encyclopedia of Earth
3. The Energy Certificate. An article on Energy Accounting as proposed by Technocracy Inc.
4. U.S. Department of Labor. "Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey". Retrieved 2006-04-09.
5. European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. "Labour force participation". Retrieved 2006-12-28.

• Technocracy movement