Kenneth E. Boulding: Trending quotes (page 5)

“[In order to define the distinction between a grant and an exchange transaction, Boulding has used the net worth criterion] If there is no decrease in the net worth of either party, the transaction is exchange; if there is, it contains some grant element and is an explicit or implicit grant.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, The Economy of Love and Fear, 1973, p. 88 as cited in: Omicron Delta Epsilon, Omicron Chi Epsilon (1997) The American economist. Vol. 41-42. p. 20

“[The loss- of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

According to Marike Finlay (1987) Powermatics: A Discursive Critique of New Technology. p. 200 with this statement "Kenneth Boulding has shown, the extent of control is a function of loss-of-strength gradient of a political centre."
Source: 1960s, Conflict and defense: A general theory, 1962, p. 245

Home , Loss

“Looked at from the perspective of twentieth-century earth, we see three great stages in the dynamic process of the universe. To this whole process, as it spreads out over perhaps ten billion years of time and ten billion light years of space, we give the name evolution, and we see three great patterns within it. The first is physical evolution. This presumably started with the development of the most elementary particles (whatever they may be); then of neutrons, protons, electrons, and radiations; then of elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond formed by combining protons and electrons; then of chemical compounds; then finally of increasingly complex molecules from amino acids, and proteins to the great watershed of DNA, the beginnings of life.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 28

Life , Light , Universe , Time

“[Boulding's belief in] the immediate experience of the Holy Spirit, or Inward Light, available to every man to teach, guide, reprove, and draw him up toward goodness.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 253. cited in: D.A. Latzko (1995) " Kenneth E. Boulding (18 January 1910-19 March 1993) http://www.personal.psu.edu/~dxl31/research/otherstuff/boulding.html" in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

Light , Drawing

“If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 94 as cited in: Richard Arena, Agnés Festrè, Nathalie Lazaric (2012) Handbook of Economics and Knowledge. p. 138

Change

“If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 147

“One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, The Economy of Love and Fear, 1973, p. 95

“Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness… It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1948) "Samuelson's Foundations: The Role of Mathematics in Economics," In: Journal of Political Economy, Vol 56 (June). as cited in: Peter J. Boettke (1998) " James M. Buchanan and the Rebirth of Political Economy http://publicchoice.info/Buchanan/files/boettke.htm". Boettke further explains "Boulding's words are even more telling today than they were then as we have seen the fruits of the formalist revolution in economic theory and how it has cut economics off from the social theoretic discourse on the human condition."
1940s

Mathematics , Knowledge , Perfection

“Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 12

Learning , Personality

“We cannot walk befor we toddle,
Though we may toddle far too long,
If we embrace a lovely Model
That is consistent, clear, and wrong.
- Experts from "Notes from Wooods Hole", unpublished, 1976.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 148

Love

“Economic progress… means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power — all these things clearly represent economic progress.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Remark: Kenneth Boulding gave the same example in his 1945 The economics of peace, p. 74
Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 23

Way , Grass , Water , Time

“The organizer who creates roles, who creates the holes that will force the pegs to their shape, is a prime creator of personality itself. When we ask of a man, "What is he?" the answer is usually given in terms of his major role, job, or position in society; he is the place that he fills, a painter, a priest, a politician, a criminal.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 80, quoted in: Paul S. Adler eds. (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations. p. 552

Personality

“Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Association of American Colleges (1955) Liberal education. Vol. 41, p. 430
1950s

“What might be called, perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received rather scant attention at the hands of economists. There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, The economics of knowledge and the knowledge of economics, 1966, p. 1, cited in: Brian Chi-ang Lin (2007) " A New Vision of the Knowledge Economy http://newdoc.nccu.edu.tw/teasyllabus/205016255002/JOES%20(July%202007).pdf"

Lie , Question , Knowledge , Past

“There is reason for this shift of emphasis from any actual price to a hypothetical 'equilibrium' price. It is usually more interesting to know where a train is going than to know exactly where it is at any moment. The 'equilibrium' position of any price, wage, firm, industry, or system is the position toward which it is tending. The importance of equilibrium analysis, then, is that it enables us to discuss the directions of change. If a train is in New- York and its 'equilibrium' position is in Chicago, we are reasonably confident that the general direction of its motion will be westward, even if it unaccountably decides to travel north for the first hundred and fifty miles.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 637-638 (rev. ed. 1947); cited in Macroeconomische theorie ingeleid en voortgezet. Kluwer, 2006. p. 3

Travel , Confidence , Change , Training

“Before we can proceed to a formal definition of conflict we must examine another concept, that of behavior space. The position of a behavior unit at a moment of time is defined by a set of values (subset, to be technical) of a set of variables that defines the behavior unit. These variables need not be continuous or quantitatively measurable. The different values of a variable must, however, be capable of simple ordering; that is, of any two values it must be possible to say that one is 'after' (higher, lefter, brighter than) the other.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Peace Science Society (International) (1975) Papers - Volumes 24-29. p. 53 summarized: "Boulding begins by explaining what he believes are the four basic concepts to describe a conflict in an analytical way : (1) the party; (2) the behavior space; (3) competition; (4) conflict."
Source: 1960s, Conflict and defense: A general theory, 1962, p. 3

Behavior , Time

“Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability–whether they are easily measured or not.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Ramage Magnus and Karen Shipp (2009) Systems Thinkers. p. 116
1990s and attributed

Optimism

“Reality, in its quantitative aspect, must be considered as a system of populations… The general study of the equilibria and dynamics of populations seems to have no name; but as it has probably reached its highest development in the biological study known as 'ecology,' this name may well be given to it.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, A Reconstruction of Economics, 1950, p. 5. as cited in: Robert A. Solow (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892". In: Journal of Economic Issues. Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1994), pp. 1187-1200

Reality , Study

“We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1942) " The Practice of The Love of God http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/wpl1942a.html", William Penn Lecture, delivered at Arch Street Meetinghouse, Philadelphia, 1942. In: Friends' Intelligencer, Vol. 99 p. 231-261
1940s

Love , Life , World , School

“[You know you are in a part of the economy dealing with grants instead of exchange when] A gives B something and B does not give A anything in the way of an economic good.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

McCloskey (2013) commented earlier: "Boulding invented what he called, infelicitiously, "grants economics" (he might better have used the anthropologist's term gifts, or even the theologian's term grace... It's an idea about the economy, but draws the attention of economists to exactly what they do not attend to when thinking of exchange alone."
Source: 1970s, The Economy of Love and Fear, 1973, p. i as cited in: Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (2013) What Boulding Said Went Wrong with Economics, A Quarter Century On http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/editorials/boulding.php

Way , Parting