‘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.’
The Engineers and the Price System is Thorstein Veblen’s classic book on industrial sabotage and the inefficiencies of the financial system. For Veblen, financial managers controlling the economy act in ways detrimental to the engineers responsible for production. Since the purpose of the financial system is to maximize profit, financial managers purposely manipulate supplies to this end. The wastefulness of this conduct prompted Veblen to end the book with a call to arms for engineers to become a technocratic ruling class in order to end the mismanagement of the industrial system and bring about a new era of efficient production for the common good.
Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and social scientist who made important contributions to the study of economic institutions and the study of social class. He is best known for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class which introduced the term “conspicuous consumption”.