Technocracy

You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times... and safely home again. The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting? Technocracy is a form of government in which society is ruled by those with technical knowledge. In a technocracy, leaders are selected based on their technological or scientific knowledge. The scientific method is applied to solve social and political issues within the technocracy, rather than democratically voting on a solution or compromise. The term also has a broader meaning of "political leaders that emphasize their academic background in any form of government," hence why some governments in countries like Italy or Greece are called "technocratic" by the media. A current example of this is Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

History
The word "technocracy" was popularized by an engineer in California named William Henry Smyth, who wrote of the concept of technocracy as a means to gain industrial democracy in Industrial Management in 1919. However, the OED's first citation is in a medical context, from a footnote in The Economic Journal in 1895 ("Compare the annual contest between ‘physiocracy,’ leading towards ‘nihilism,’ and ‘technocracy’ in the history of medicine"). Over a decade later, in 1933, the Technical Alliance was founded as a way to advance technocratic merit.

Concerns
Although the scientific method could help solve some issues, within the scientific method, we must find out if a hypothesis is true via testing. However, getting accurate results requires a controlled environment, and due to humans being quite unpredictable at times, achieving a controlled environment could be fruitless. Another criticism could be that scientists are not inherently fit to be in positions of power. This criticism comes from the belief that most scientists lack the charisma a leader needs.

Can democracy and a technocracy coexist?
No, or at least in its unadulterated form. As mentioned before, people within the scientific field are put into power. They are not elected.

Theoretically, one could require that all persons who sought a particular elected office would have to fulfill specific requirements, such as an accredited Ph.D. in a related field or similar condition. If the sample of people in that field was large enough, democracy could be approximated, though not perfectly achieved. Supporters of technocracy would argue that the (in their view, minor) loss of democracy is worth the (in their view, massive) increase of effective policy.