Kenneth E. Boulding: System

“The social system tends to be dominated by images… especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Toward a General Social Science, 1974, p. vii as cited by Debora Hammond (1995) "Perspectives from the Boulding files". In: Systems Research Vol. 12 No. 4, p. 281-290

Future

“[The information available within a system constitutes what Boulding (1978) calls the noosphere. It is constituted by the collection of plans, of representations, of procedures, of ideas for the construction of objects or of instructions to realize certain interaction patterns, including] the totality of the cognitive content, including values, of all human nervous systems, plus the prostatic devices by which the system is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones, post offices, and so on.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 122, cited in: Jorge Reina Schement, Brent D. Ruben (1993) Information and Behavior - Volume 4. p. 517
Robert A. Solo (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892" commented: "The image appears as crucial in Boulding's treatment of societal evolution. Here the record is in human artifacts, not only in material structures such as buildings and machines, telephones and radios, but also in organizations including the extended family, the tribe, the nation, and the corporation. All such artifacts originate in and are sustained by images in the human mind. Civilization and civilized man, in the language that he knows, the skills he acquires, the whole heritage of tradition and manners he has learned, are human artifacts."

Idea

“Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 20

“[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, 1956, p. 22 as cited in: Robert A. Solo (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

World , Behavior , Sense

“In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an "ecosystem" that is, an ecological system of which biological systems--forests, fields, swamps--are other examples.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, A Reconstruction of Economics, 1950, p. 6

“Nations are divided into "good"and "bad"-the enemy is all bad, one's own nation is of spotless virtue. Wars are either acts of God or acts of the other nations, which always catch us completely by surprise. To a student of international systems the national image even of respectable, intellectual, and powerful people seems naive and untrue. The patriotism of the sophisticated cannot be a simple faith. There is, however, in the course of human history a powerful and probably irreversible movement toward sophistication. We can wise up, but we cannot wise down, except at enormous cost in the breakdown of civilizations, and not even a major breakdown results in much loss of knowledge.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, National images and international systems, 1959, p. 131

God , War , People , Faith

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63.
C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities."
1940s

Lie , Sense , Sea

“It is important to realize that the exercise of any skill depends on the ability to create an abstract system of some kind out of the totality of the world around us. For instance, the carpenter is not interested in wood as a biological or chemical entity. He is sensitive to many of its grosser physical properties but not to many subtler ones. The wood of a carpenter is not the real — that is, the complete substance — but merely wood as a material on which the carpenter can exercise his skill.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 9

World , Exercises , Dependency

“There is a kind of second law of cultural dynamics which states simply that when anything has been done, it cannot be done again. In other words, we start off any system with a potential for novelty which is gradually exhausted. We see this in every field of human life, in the arts as well as the sciences. Once Beethoven has written the Ninth Symphony, nobody else can do it. Consequently, we find that in any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. The "entropy trap" is perhaps the most subtle and the most fundamental of the obstacles toward realising the developed society…”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1970) "The Science Revelation". In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (Sept 1970) Vol. 26, nr. 7. p. 16
1970s

Life , Law , Art , Search

“General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the "real" world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science, 1956, p. 197: Opening sentences

World , Mathematics , Knowledge , Study

“The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 9-10 as cited in: Mark W. W. McElroy, J.M.L. M. L. van van Engelen (2012) Corporate Sustainability Management.

Idea , Nature , Change , Success

“The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist — a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 15

“With the development of the human race (and perhaps a little earlier), a new structure emerges, which we can call know-what. This consists of the structures in the nervous system which presumably map into some kind of images in the of the 'mind', which also map into structure in the 'real world', whatever that is. Know-what is very different from know-how. The fertilized egg certainly has the know-how to make whatever organism it knows how to make, but it is very doubtful that it knows what it is doing. The remarkable thing about know-what is that it creates know-how, as we see with the fantastic burgeoning of human artifacts under the influence of a science-based technology. Science, fundamentally, deals with know-what and this enormously increases know-how.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1984) In: Meheroo Jussawalla, Helene Ebenfield eds. Communication and information economics: new perspectives. p. vii as cited in: John Laurent (2003) Evolutionary Economics and Human Nature. p. 177
1980s

World , Science

“I was born on January 18, 1910 at 4 Seymour Street, off. London Road, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, Great. Britain, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe. Writing out my full address like this was a great satisfaction when I was a boy. Seymour Street had a solid row of narrow, four-story houses on both sides, each with a flight of steps leading up to the front door, and what we called an "airy," a rectangular hole in front of the basement window, often with steps leading down to a basement underneath the front door. The streets of the neighborhood spoke of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century— St. Vincent Street, Rodney Street, Lord Nelson Street. Close by was dirty Lime Street Station; St. George's Hall, a magnificent classical structure the center of Liverpudlian splendor; the theaters; and the great Picton Library with its huge circular reading room. The neighborhood was very mixed; we belonged to the English minority in Liverpool, a city largely populated by the Irish and the Welsh.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 3

War , World , Boy , Universe

“The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1986) "Proceedings of the 7th Friends Association for Higher Education Conference, Malone College, 1986" p. 4, quoted in Debora Hammond, The Science of Synthesis, Colorado: University of Colorado Press, 2003.
1980s

World

“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

“[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

“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

“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