FUTURE UTOPIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 220, 17 September 1934, Page 11

FUTURE UTOPIA.

| HOPE OF TECHMOCRACY. I j GAINING SUPPORT IN U.S.A. i Technocracy is not dead in America, nor even sleeping, but is gaining in power and numbers, especially on the | We.3t Coast, Mr. Howard Scott, one of tho founders says. The sincerest form 'of flattery lias begun to embarrass Mr. I Scott and his co-workers. An organisaI tion of 200,000 in Southern California, called "The Utopians, Inc," has borj rowed some of the technocratic formulae, land is preparing to spread out on a | national scale. It takes a great many : ergs of Mr. Scott's energy to keep | denying that he has anything to do with I them. He also has had to deny that Ihe is at the back of Upton Sinclair's J race for Governor of California on a ; quasi-technocratic ticket. | "Our technological* set-up is so complicated," said Mr. Scott, "that when . you displace a load factor anywhere I along the line .you have a grave un- ! balance. Why, if 50,000 mothers and fathers were denied work or home relief i to-morrow, and decided that they j couldn't continue to care for their ! children and marched with them down to the City Hall and laid them in the lap of *the city) and said, 'All right, you take care of them,' it would disrupt ths Government." Demolishing New York. Mr. Scott gave a brief outline of what lifo under technocracy would be like— in fifteen years, he thought. There would be no such thing as New York, because New York is uneconomic. The off-peak load system means wastes which if saved would permit the' tearing down and building of an entirely new and more evenly distributed city, where 1 all processes from the delivery of milk ; to the disposition of garbage would be ! automatic. All the happy householders , would have to do in exchange would be to work four hours a day for the equivalent of a £4000 a year income. New York, as it is known to-day, would become one vast mine, a mine for the reclaiming of metals buried underground and beneath the limestone exteriors of skyscrapers. 1 A non-transferable token of energy I which cannot be stolen, grafted, or given ] away, but which can only be spent for j commodities, was described by Mr. Scotc down to the last watermark and accounting problem. This is to be what corresponds to money as closely as can be imagined under a non-price system. The United States, once technocracy got started, would have no use for gold save to buy up all the manganese, tin, nickel, and other metals not produced on this continent.