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The Engineers and the Price System
Veblen's 1921 essays arguing technically competent engineers should govern production for output rather than profit — a diagnosis outlasting its remedy.
Published in 1921, The Engineers and the Price System collected Veblen's essays from The Dial arguing that industrial civilization was governed by two groups with systematically opposed interests: engineers (the technically competent class understanding the productive process) and the business class (owners and financiers controlling production through capital). Engineers' objective was production — more output, better quality, greater efficiency. Businessmen's objective was profit — the differential between cost and revenue maintained through managing prices, supply, and market position. These objectives were compatible sometimes but incompatible under normal industrial conditions. Businessmen restricted output when unrestricted output would reduce prices, maintained excess capacity when deployment would flood markets, invested in financial instruments when financial returns exceeded productive returns. In each case, rational profit pursuit produced suboptimal deployment of productive capacity the state of the industrial arts made available.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Veblen's proposed remedy was a 'soviet of technicians' assuming control of the productive process to organize it for output rather than profit.