‘Technocrats?’ said my husband, turning his face from the television and the latest news from Italy, looking at me for a change, and putting his whisky glass down in puzzlement. ‘Aren’t those the chaps who helped Franco out?’
‘I don’t think they can be exactly the same people still, darling,’ I replied soothingly. But he had a point. It seems strange that we should think politicians more capable simply because they rejoice in the name technocrats, as the men put in to run Greece, Italy and are called. And a technocrat as a caretaker prime minister for Egypt seemed to be just the bone to throw the crowds in Tahrir Square. The techno- part derives from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘a carpenter’, but we have all come across carpenters who make tables that wobble no matter how many times they saw a bit off a leg.
My husband was right that technocrats had been held responsible for economic growth before, if in circumstances very different from today’s.
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