Kenneth E. Boulding: Economics (page 2)

“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

“They, economics and evolution, are both examples of a larger process, which has been at work in this part of the universe for a very long time. This is the process of the development of structures of increasing complexity and improbability. The evolutionary process always operates through mutation and selection and has involved some distinction between the genotype which mutates and the phenotype which is selected. The process by which the genotype constructs the phenotype may be described as "organization". Economic development manifesto itself largely in the production of commodities, that is, goods and services. It originates, however, in ideas, plans, and attitudes in the human mind. These are the genotypes in economic development. This whole process indeed can be described as a process in the growth of knowledge. What the economist calls "capital" is nothing more than human knowledge imposed on the material world. Knowledge and the growth of knowledge, therefore, is the essential key to economic development. Investment, financial systems and economic organizations and institutions are in a sense only the machinery by which a knowledge process is created and expressed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1977) Economic Development as an Evolutionary System, Fifth World Congress of the International Economic Association, Tokyo, Aug.-Sept. 1977.
1970s

World , Idea , Knowledge , Sense

“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 252, quoted in Leonard Silk (1976) The Economists. New York: Basic Books. p. 208

Problem

“It is an arithmetic, moreover, which cannot be denied even though we nearly all try to deny it. The arithmetic is simply this: Any positive rate of growth whatever eventually carries a human population to an unacceptable magnitude, no matter how small the rate of growth may be unless the rate of population growth can be reduced to zero before the population reaches an unacceptable magnitude. There is a famous theorem in economics, one which I call the dismal theorem, which states that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the population will grow until it is sufficiently miserable and starving to check its growth. There is a second, even worse theorem which I call the utterly dismal theorem. It says that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery than before and hence to increase the total sum of human misery.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, The meaning of the twentieth century: the great transition, 1964, p. 126

People

“A distinguished economist, on being asked to define the subject matter of his science, once replied, "Economics is what economists do."”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 3

Science

“[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics… [which] involves study of those aspects of men’s images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Contemporary Economic Research". In Donald P. Ray (ed.). Trends in Social Science, pp. 9-26. as cited in: James Alm (2011) Testing Behavioral Public Economics Theories in the Laboratory http://econ.tulane.edu/RePEc/pdf/tul1102.pdf. Working paper.
Alm proceeds by stating: "Given the essential role of psychological insights in the field, together with the obvious truism that all economics concerns “behavior” in one form or another, a more descriptive name for the field is perhaps “cognitive economics”, as recognized early on by Boulding (1958)."
1950s

Men , Behavior , Decision , Study

“I seem to have come to much of the same conclusion as you have reached, though approaching it from the direction of economics and the social sciences rather than from biology - that there is a body of what have been calling "general empirical theory," or "general system theory" in your excellent terminology, which is of wide applicability in many different disciplines. I am sure there are many people all over the world who have come to essentially the same position that we have, but we are widely scattered and do not know each other, so difficult is it to cross the boundaries of the disciplines.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1953) in letter to Bertalanffy, cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 14
1950s

People , World , Science

“Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. 34. (rev. ed. 1948) cited in: J.P. Roos (1973) Welfare Theory and Social Policy: A Study in Policy Science - Nummer 4. p. 102

Life , Science , Housing

“Without the heroic, man has no meaning; without the economic, he has no sense. Economic man is most likely to be economic woman — a good wife, pulling the coat tails of her heroic husband, checking his extravagances of speech and action with words of caution and good sense. But without the heroic coat tails to pull, life for both of them would be dull and savorless indeed.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 183

Life , Sense

“Reconstruction is merely a special case of economic progress. If we are to understand its problems thoroughly, we must examine what is meant by economic progress and try to discover how it comes about… Economic progress is not altogether easy to define and is even more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the phrase clearly corresponds to a meaningful idea. We have only to contrast a savage society with our own. In a savage society, the same customs, the same techniques, the same ways of doing everything, from ploughing to praying, are maintained generation after generation, son following exactly in the footsteps of his father and daughter in the footsteps of her mother, without deviating an inch from the well-trodden way. In modern civilized society, on the other hand, there is constant change and flux; we are constantly improving on the methods of our ancestors, and indeed one of the surest ways to discredit anything is to call it "old-fashioned!"”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 73

Way , Idea , Fashion , Understanding

“The main key to the economics of the postwar world is a simple truism — that the rate of accumulation is equal to the rate of production less the rate of consumption. This is the "Bathtub Theorem." Production may be likened to the flow of water from the faucet, consumption to the flow down the drain. The difference between these two flows is the rate at which the water in the bathtub - the total stockpile of all goods - is accumulating.
War drains the economic bathtub in a great waste of consumption. The first problem of reconstruction is to rebuild the stockpile. It can be rebuilt only by widening the gap between production and consumption, or, in the case of a single country, by importing more than is exported. It is difficult for a ravaged country to increase either its production or its net imports. Unless it can obtain outside help, therefore, it must suffer a drastic restriction of consumption. Frequently the only way consumption can be restricted is by inflation. Here, therefore, is the key to the most fundamental problems of reconstruction.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Preface
1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945

War , World , Way , Problem

“In spite of the moderate usefulness of what the economist has to say on this subject… there is a cry for a cultural anthropologist or even a psychologist when the economist runs into sacred cows, extended families, traditional motivations, levels of achievement, and social morale, all of which may be more important to economic development than any of the traditional economic variables. We still await a true synthesis of the insights of economics with those of other social sciences in the area”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1961). "Contemporary economic research: . In Donald P. Ray (Ed.) Trends in social science. p..19 cited in: Erik Angner & George Loewenstein (2006) Behavioral Economics http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/BehavioralEconomics.pdf
1960s

Family , Motivation , Science , Cry