That wouldn't be stable if the technical caste found itself some political ambition.

The modern corporate structure and the narrow specialisation of technical specialists has been quite successful in suppressing political ambition (and not teaching the relevant political skills to those who may have any such ambition).

Yes, the technicians can make the system stop working. But why should they? Their feudal overlords provide them with a steady income, access to their favourite toys and enough excuses to ignore the huddled masses.

The crucial point would be to isolate the technical specialists from direct exposure to poverty - as long as they, their families and their immediate surroundings are kept pretty, it is a simple matter to instill the kind of smug superiority and/or convenient excuses for inaction that permit people to ignore widespread human misery.

Oh, it would not work perfectly - there would be dissenters. But the genius of modern managed democracy, from the perspective of the feudal elite, is that dissenters are alright, because the oppression is not sufficiently self-evident that individual dissent can cause a cascading reaction.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

we'll see another major war,

the one on gaia isn't enough?

where do you think, TBG, and is it a WW? obviously our little skirmishes in afpak and iraq don't count...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty