When C S Lewis created NICE, he may have have been inspired by something like this.

 The remarkable thing about Technocracy is that it has to be the most influential failed political movement in the history of the world. 

In 1932, with the world in the depths of the Great Depression and the United States on the verge of electing the  great unknown of the Roosevelt administration, the American public was about as calm as a cat on a griddle.   For twenty years politicians and the traditional institutions had faced the threats of war and peace and been found wanting.  A new, technological age with a tremendous potential for creativity and destruction had arisen.  Great machines had been built and huge networks of production and commerce had been established.  These tremendous works required skilled engineers and technicians to build and maintain them, yet when it came to how to employ these machines or even how to run society itself, civilised man still looked to rank amateurs whose only qualification to govern was that they got themselves elected. 

To some people, this was absurd.  No one in his right mind would ever entrust an electrical power plant to a man who just happened to come along and stuck his name on a ballot.  it would be an act of pure madness.  Yet nations are perfectly willing to have their governments run on precisely that basis.

That was the essential argument of Technocracy. It was a system that advocated the replacement of political control of all matters technical with that of engineers. The logic was that, unlike politicians and other laymen, engineers deal only in objective facts.  They don't let things like emotions or ideology get in the way of solving a problem. 

It didn't stop there, of course.  Utopias never do.  If society is to be run by engineers, it must be run along engineering lines.  For example, money must become a thing of the past.  Instead, the State would determine how much energy is generated each year and how much energy each manufactured article takes to produce it.  Every citizen would be given so many "energy credits" per year to buy things equivalent to, say, $20,000.  Any credits left over at the end of the year would be annulled to prevent the accumulation of wealth. 

As to everyday life, the work week would be a mere 16 hours with extra hours available to the ambitious.  Promotion would be by scientific formulae wielded by experts in the employee's field rather than managers or personnel officers.  Eventually, arts, poetry, fashion, law enforcement,  procreation and all other aspects of life will come under the Technocratic umbrella until,  in the words of Archibald MacLeish,

Nothing is required of man but that he should submit to the laws of physics, measure his life in ergs and discard all interests which cannot be expressed in foot pounds per second.

Technocracy hit its peak in 1932 after being the topic of a feature article in The New York Times.  For a few months, Technocracy had a vogue as it captured the imaginations of Socialists, Progressives, and those in general who favoured a planned political economy.  It seemed like such an easy way to square the circle: Put the engineers in charge.

Then the Technocracy Movement started to run into problems.  People started asking questions such as, how does the system of energy credits differ from conventional money?  How can you allocate the energy allowance of a service industry?  Won't engineers have their own self-interests or ideologies to promote?  Isn't Technocracy a form of Puritanism?  How can anyone be expected to live a life entirely focused on production? 

Worse, Howard Scott, the prophet of Technocracy turned out to be less the heroic engineer than he seemed.  He had little formal education, wasn't much of an engineer, and his one large project ended with a US government investigation denouncing him for “gross waste, inefficiency, and shoddy workmanship.”  Though the movement continued to exist, and still does in various forms, by the summer of 1933 it was receiving comments such as these:

"Cleverest pseudo-scientific hoax yet perpetrated" (American Engineering Council).

"Intellectual mah jong . . . Greenwich Village economics" (University of Chicago).

Despite the flop of the Technocracy Movement, the idea of technocracy was a siren song to would-be Utopians and despots throughout the 20th century.  It became a stock aspect of the scientifically rational society of the future. 

Reading through the pages of the 20th century, echoes of technocracy can be found in  Franklin Roosevelt's constant attempts to control the American economy, the "Whiz Kids" of the Kennedy administration, the grimily remorseless five-year plans of the Communists, Harold Wilson's faith in the "White heat of technology", Isaac Asimov's stories about computers that rule over a tidy future Earth, and, of course, in the romances and political tracts of H G Wells, who, in the words of George Orwell,

History as [Wells] sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.

Orwell also pointed out in his famous essays that Mr Wells never grasped the irony that so much of what he espoused about a planned, controlled society found its embodiment in Nazi Germany.

Even today, Technocracy finds its champions in those who desire just a little tyranny and who rage against the machine while desiring to make his fellow man a cog in a far worse one.
 

Technocracy: Wellsian style.

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