Science VS Economics

The spirit and method of Science arc the direct antithesis of magic. It is science which has produced the "Machine Shop". It is magic that has produced "Finance". In the machine shop. Science rules only in so far as machine processes go: there its control stops. The social control of the Machine Shop lies with the Towosis of Finance. Thus it is that our Towosis (like those Of Trobriand) control not only the work, the workmen, the work shop — "industrial society" is only the Great ...

 What Happened to the Roman Apartment Buildings?

It is both a sad and a happy fact of engineering history that disasters have been powerful instruments of change. Designers learn from failure. Industrial society did not invent grand works of engineering, and it was not the first to know design failure. What it did do was develop powerful techniques for learning from the experience of past disasters. It is extremely rare today for an apartment house in North America, Europe, or Japan to fall down. Ancient Rome had large apartment buildings t...

 The Relationship of Industrial Society to Knowledge

Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. R...