My brother Edward Tenner some years ago pointed to the paucity of engineers in Congress compared even to physicians, let alone businessmen and (of course) lawyers. As he notes, the scarcity of engineers in modern Anglo-American politics (despite Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter) is in marked contrast to their prominence in politics in other cultures (obviously including the USSR and other Communist nations but not limited to them): "Globally, then, the unpolitical Anglo-American nerd is the exception. The argument that gained credence in 19th-century France and was echoed in other regimes is that a state must be guided by a scientific and technological elite. Two forces kept that notion from taking hold in the United States. The first was American suspicion of central government. The second was industry's appetite for engineers; at the turn of the 20th century, U.S. companies fearing manpower shortages resisted attempts to make elite postgraduate degrees the norm for engineers, as they were becoming for lawyers, doctors, and executives." https://www.technologyreview.com/2005/04/01/231337/engineers-and-political-power/
So is there any plausible POD for changing the situation whereby in the US "engineers...continue to design and implement everything but our laws"? The Technocracy movement, with its advocacy of an enhanced role for engineers, had a certain vogue in the 1930's but never became a really formidable political force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement and since we are having a separate thread on it, https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=377639 I would prefer other possible POD's.
So is there any plausible POD for changing the situation whereby in the US "engineers...continue to design and implement everything but our laws"? The Technocracy movement, with its advocacy of an enhanced role for engineers, had a certain vogue in the 1930's but never became a really formidable political force http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement and since we are having a separate thread on it, https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=377639 I would prefer other possible POD's.
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