The Engineers and the Price System |
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absentee owners absentee ownership administration America Bolshevism business concerns business enterprise businesslike control businesslike management captains of finance captains of industry cerns commercial competitive conscientious withdrawal continued corporation finance country's industrial system course derangement disallowance duction dustrial system dustry effect engineers equipment established order fact free income Guardians habitual hand ical IMPERIAL GERMANY increasing increasingly indispensable indus industrial arts industrial experts industrial forces industrial sys investment bankers manœuvres material welfare means mechanical industry ment move nature of sabotage ness obstruction ordinary organization popular present productive capacity productive industry profitable rate and volume reasonably régime revolutionary overturn sales-costs salesmanship Soviet Soviet Russia statesmen strategy substantial syndicalists syndicate technicians technological things THORSTEIN VEBLEN tion traffic will bear trained trial system underlying population unemployment usufruct Vested Interests vested rights visibly volume of output waste withdrawal of efficiency
Popular passages
Page 48 - It is eminently a system, self-balanced and comprehensive: and it is a system of interlocking mechanical processes, rather than of skilful manipulation. It is mechanical rather than manual. It is an organization of mechanical powers and material resources, rather than of skilled craftsmen and tools; although the skilled workmen and tools are also an indispensable part of its comprehensive mechanism. It is of an impersonal nature, after the fashion of the material sciences, on which it constantly...
Page 129 - They now constitute the general staff of the industrial system, in fact; whatever law and custom may formally say in protest. The "captains of industry" may still vaingloriously claim that distinction, and law and custom still countenance their claim; but the captains have no technological value, in fact. Therefore any question of a revolutionary overturn, in America . . . resolves itself in practical fact into a question of what the guild of technicians will do.
Page 75 - They are, by force of circumstance, the keepers of the community's material welfare ; although they have hitherto been acting, in effect, as keepers and providers of free income for the kept classes. They are thrown into the position of responsible directors of the industrial system, and by the same move they are in a position to become arbiters of the community's material welfare. They are becoming class-conscious, and they are no longer driven by a commercial interest, in any such degree as will...
Page 49 - This industrial system runs on as an inclusive organization of many and diverse interlocking mechanical processes, interdependent and balanced among themselves in such a way that the due working of any part of it is conditioned on the due working of all the rest.
Page 95 - Revolutions in the eighteenth century," Veblen wrote, "were military and political; and the Elder Statesmen who now believe themselves to be making history still believe that revolutions can be made and unmade by the same ways and means in the twentieth century. But any substantial or effectual overturn in the twentieth century will necessarily be an industrial overturn; and by the same token, any twentieth century revolution can be combatted or neutralized only by industrial ways and means.
Page 86 - He described the American Federation of Labor in these terms: "At the best, its purpose and ordinary business is to gain a little something for its own members at a more than proportionate cost to the rest of the community; which does not afford either the spiritual or material ground for a popular overturn.
Page 56 - ... quality of goods and services should be produced; and the decision of the business management has always continued to be final, and has always set the limit beyond which production must not go. With the continued growth of specialization the experts have necessarily had more and more to say in the affairs of industry; but always their findings as to what work is to be done and what ways and means are to be employed in production have had to wait on the findings of the business managers as to...
Page 134 - It is the purpose of this memorandum to show, in an objective way, that under existing circumstances there need be no fear, and no hope, of an effectual revolutionary overturn in America, such as would unsettle the established order and unseat those Vested Interests that now control the country's industrial system.
Page 51 - Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias.
Page 131 - By settled habit the technicians, the engineers, and industrial experts, are a harmless and docile sort, well fed on the whole, and somewhat placidly content with the 'full dinner-pail,' which the lieutenants of the Vested Interests habitually allow them.