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Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes
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Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He published over three dozen books and over one-hundred dozen articles. Current Contents found him to be one of those rare authors of a "Citation Classic." Indeed, even more rare, he was the author of two Citation Classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory . He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to Elise M. Boulding.

✵ 18. January 1910 – 18. March 1993
Kenneth E. Boulding: 163   quotes 5   likes

Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

“[Boulding grasps the significance of sociobiology's emphasis on biogenetics] that there are biogenetic factors in learning capacity and potential can hardly be denied… [yet] biogenetically imposed limits to human learning… seem to be much more remote… than are the limitations imposed by the biogenetic structure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 21 as cited in: W.R. Brown and M.J. Schaefermeyer (1980) "Progress in communication as a social science". In: Dan Nimmo eds. Communication Yearbook 4. p. 38

Learning

“[The theory of the firm] is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a ‘firm’ whose product is ‘utility’.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 799

Indifference

“Economics deals with the behavior of commodities rather than with the behavior of men.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York: Truman Talley Books, E.P. Dutton, 1986, p. 21.
1980s

Men , Behavior

“[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world… Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1986) "What Went Wrong with Economics?" in: The American Economist Vol 30 (Spring) pp. 7-8, as cited in: Deirdre McCloskey (2013) " What Boulding Said Went Wrong with Economics, A Quarter Century On http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/editorials/boulding.php"
1980s

World , Water , Science , Dependency

“Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 400

“A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields… leading towards a "system of systems."… I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

1950s, General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, 1956

“Two possible approaches to the organization of general systems theory suggest themselves, which are to be thought of as complementary rather than competitive, or at least as two roads each of which is worth exploring. The first approach is to look over the empirical universe and to pick out certain general phenomena which are found in many different disciplines, and to seek to build up general theoretical models relevant to these phenomena. The second approach is to arrange the empirical fields in a hierarchy of complexity of organization of their basic "individual" or unit of behavior, and to try to develop a level of abstraction appropriate to each.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, 1956, p. 200

Behavior , Universe

“Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits."”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in Michael H. Prosser, K. S. Sitaram (1999) Civic Discourse: Intercultural, International, and Global Media. p. 11
1990s and attributed

“If we saw tomorrow’s newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Russell Ackoff " Russell Ackoff: A Lifetime of Systems Thinking; Editor’s note http://www.pegasuscom.com/levpoints/ackoff_a-lifetime-of-systems-thinking.html" in: Leverage Points, Issue 115.
1990s and attributed

“Almost every organization… exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 10 as cited in: Joseph T. Mahoney & Anne S. Huff (1993) Toward a New Social Contract. Theory in Organization Science https://ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/30105/towardnewsocialc93136maho.pdf?sequence=2 Faculty paper, University of Illinois at Urbana

World , Smile

“[The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Spicer (1997) explains: "Boulding (1989) referred to three independent systems from which power is exercised in our society: threat, production and exchange, and integrative. The threat system is one in which power is accomplished through coercion in its many guises, often including asymmetrical one-way persuasive communication exchanges. The production and exchange system speaks to the economic system, of which public relations is certainly a part. And, finally, the integrative system.
Source: 1980s, Three Faces of Power, 1989, p. 670-671 as cited in: Christopher Spicer (1997) Organizational Public Relations: A Political Perspective. p. 248

Love , Friendship , Communication

“In this chapter I want to raise the question partly in jest but partly also in seriousness whether the concept of the image cannot become the abstract foundation of a new science, or at least a cross-disciplinary specialization. As I am indulging in the symbolic communication of an image of images I will even venture to give the science a name — Eiconics — hoping thereby to endow it in the minds of my readers with some of the prestige of classical antiquity. I run some risk perhaps of having my new science confused with the study of icons. A little confusion, however, and the subtle overtones of half-remembered associations are all part of the magic of the name.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Robert A. Solo (1994) commented: "Curiously, and quite independently of the publication of the The Image, there did occur in the 1950s and in the decades that followed a revolutionary transformation of the social and behavioral sciences associated with the term structuralism, which hinged on the concept and study of the image (call it cognitive structure, or paradigm, or episteme, or ideology). This was the case in the work of Jean Piaget in psychology, of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Foucault in the history and philosophy of science, of Noam Chomsky in linguistics, of Claude Levi Strauss in anthropology, and others. Though The Image was the first and in my view by far the finest American structuralist essay, it had no visible impact on economics... The economist's image of his world is alas very difficult to penetrate and even more difficult to change."
Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 128

Hope , Communication , Question , Study

“Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.” Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

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

History , Strong , Learning , Universe

“We have defined the main task of economic analysis as the explanation of the magnitudes of economic quantities. The student will find also that the main part of this, as of most other works on the subject, is concerned with the theory of the determination of prices, wages, interest rates, incomes, and the like. He may well inquire, therefore, in the midst of so much mathematics, whether the first task of economics is not the investigation of wealth, or welfare. Some economists have endeavored to restrict the boundaries of the science to the investigation of those quantities which are numerically measurable. Well-being, under such a restriction, would not be part of economics at all.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 7-8

Mathematics , Science , Parting , Wealth

“My first acquaintance with the work of Dr. Fred Polak came in the year 1954–5, when we were both fellows at the new Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Dr. and Mrs. Polak lived in a little house at the back of the garden of the house that the Bouldings rented and participated very cheerfully in the life of the Bouldings and their four young children. Many exciting things came out of that year at Stanford, such as the Society for General Systems Research and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. But looking back on the expérience after nearly twenty years, I think the most important impact on the thought of both Elise Boulding and myself were the many conversations that we had with the Polaks around the dining table and in the garden.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1973) in: Foreword of The Image of the Future by Fred Polak.
1970s

Life , Children , Behavior , Thinking

“It is probable that when future historians of economic thought look back over this century, the thirties will appear as an era of rapid development in economic theory. Not only has there been unusual activity in monetary theory, theory of value. but extensive transformations have also been made in the basic theory of value. The outstanding publications in this field are, of course, Joan Robinson's Theory of Imperfect Competition and Chamberlin's Theory of Monopolistic Competition, the first produced in Cambridge, England, and the second in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These volumes mark the explicit recognition of the theory of the firm as an integral division of economic analysis upon which rests the whole fabric of equilibrium theory. General equilibrium is nothing more than the problem of the interaction of individual economic organisms, under various conditions and assumptions; as a necessary preliminary to its solution, an adequate theory of the individual organism itself is necessary.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 791

Problem , Appearance , Future

“The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1973) Image and Environment. p. ix
1970s

Science

“The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 793 cited in: Pedro Garcia Duarte (2010) " A Path through the Wilderness: Time Discounting in Growth Models http://public.econ.duke.edu/~staff/wrkshop_papers/2009-2010_Papers/PGDuarte_Path_Through_Wilderness.pdf"

Question , Time

“A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1966) Economics and Ecology. p. 225
1960s

Animals

“As I sit at my desk, I know where I am. I see before me a window; beyond that some trees; beyond that the red roofs of the campus of Stanford University; beyond them the trees and the roof tops which mark the town of Palo Alto; beyond them the bare golden hills of the Hamilton Range… beyond that other mountains, range upon range, until we come to the Rockies; beyond that the Great Plains and the Mississippi; beyond that the Alleghenies; beyond that the eastern seaboard; beyond that the Atlantic Ocean; beyond that is Europe; beyond that is Asia. I know, furthermore, that if I go far enough I will come back to where I am now. In other words, I have a picture of the earth as round. I visualize it as a globe. I am a little hazy on some of the details… I probably could not draw a very good map of Indonesia, but I have a fair idea where everything is located on the face of this globe. Looking further, I visualize the globe as a small speck circling around a bright star which is the sun, in the company of many other similar specks, the planets. Looking still further, I see our star the sun as a member of millions upon millions of others in the Galaxy. Looking still further, I visualize the Galaxy as one of millions upon millions of others in the universe.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 3 Introduction

Mountain , Star , Idea , Tree

“In view of the importance of philanthropy in our society, it is surprising that so little attention has been given to it by economic or social theorists. In economic theory, especially, the subject is almost completely ignored. This is not, I think, because economists regard mankind as basically selfish or even because economic man is supposed to act only in his self-interest; it is rather because economics has essentially grown up around the phenomenon of exchange and its theoretical structure rests heavily on this process.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1962) " Notes on a Theory of Philanthropy http://www.nber.org/chapters/c1992.pdf" in: Philanthropy and Public Policy. Frank G. Dickinson, ed., New York, National Bureau of Economic Research.
1960s

Thinking , Selfishness

“[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

“Production functions involving only land, labor and capital… never work and never explain economic development.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1990). "Taxonomy as a Source of Error." in Methodus Vol 2. p. 17-21, as cited in: Deirdre McCloskey (2013) " What Boulding Said Went Wrong with Economics, A Quarter Century On http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/editorials/boulding.php"
1990s and attributed

“The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 8

Future

“Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 117

History , Learning , Science

“The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The theory of the firm in the last ten Years, 1942, p. 800 cited in: P. Lloyd (2012) "The Discovery of the Isoquant - History of Political Economy"

“It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, 1968, p. 141 as cited in John Laurent (2003) Evolutionary Economics and Human Nature. p. 175

Nature , Knowledge , Thinking

“In modern industry, research
Has come to be a kind of Church
Where rubber-aproned acolytes
Perform their Scientific Rites
And firms spend funds they do not hafter
In hope of benefits Hereafter.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 96

Hope

“[Boulding once said, in response to a forecast that someday every American would be earning $100,000 per year] So what? Someone will still have to take out the garbage.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Donella Meadows (1989) " Thoughts While Cleaning The Living Room: Domestic work is undervalued - but it doesn't need to be http://www.context.org/iclib/ic21/meadows/" in Caring For Families Vol 21. (Spring 1989). p. 16
1980s

“One can even go beyond know-what into know-whether. This involves the evaluative structure of the human mind which enables us to make decisions and choices among different images of the future. Human behavior cannot be explained without this further development in the hierarchy that starts with simple information. This actually goes back a long way in evolution. Even the amoeba knows whether to absorb a piece of grit or a piece of food.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1984) In: Meheroo Jussawalla, Helene Ebenfield eds. Communication and information economics: new perspectives. p. vii
1980s

Food , Way , Behavior , Decision

“[In this auction we may expect the article to be sold to] "the most eager buyer at a price which is just about the highest he is willing to pay, for in this case the most eager buyer does not know what prices the other buyers are willing to give [and] … each buyer fear that someone may slip in ahead of him.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 42 as cited in: Vernon L. Smith (1991) Papers in Experimental Economics. p. 516

Fear