Veblen and Technical Efficiency

Engineers abandoned their pursuits of an engineering-based understanding of technical efficiency as they became acculturated into managerial perspectives and business pursuits in the 1920s. They adopted definitions of efficiency that were much more compatible with conventional pecuniary measures. These measures quickly became dominant as engineers learned to become economists in the narrowest sense of that term. Two comments by and about Gantt, the Taylorite who sought most diligently to develop a model of the economy using his engineering training and Veblenian ideas, suggest that a more useful brand of economics might have been constructed had more engineers endeavored to use their engineering training to understand the new industrial system. Gantt suggested in 1919 that economists were concerned mainly with understanding exchange and trade and thus understood little about actual production processes, where engineers by contrast were the only members of the community who understand the needs of the nation, desires of the workmen, and the power of the productive forces.