Engineers...are professionally driven by...the half-artistic joy in technically perfecting the productive apparatus....The engineer’s interest is in technical efficiency – in extracting the maximum amount of sucrose from a given input of sugar cane; and from this standpoint machines are often more reliable than men....A decision is taken, for example, to establish a plant of some given productive capacity in a developing country. Engineers trained according to developed country curricula are asked to design the plant. They produce blueprints for a limited number of alternatives, each of which is a variant on current “bestpractice” technique. The alternatives are submitted to economic...scrutiny, the most attractive chosen, and another capital-intensive, technologically inappropriate plant is established.