“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.”

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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, q…" by Kenneth E. Boulding?
Kenneth E. Boulding photo
Kenneth E. Boulding 163
British-American economist 1910–1993

Related quotes

Kai Ryssdal photo

“The stock market is not the economy, and the economy is not the stock market.”

Kai Ryssdal (1963) Radio host, United States Navy officer

repeatedly on his radio program " Marketplace APM https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/30/the-stock-market-is-not-the-economy/" (September 2019)

“Product and service quality can be defined as the total composite product and service characteristics of marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance through which the product and service in use will meet the expectations of the customer.”

Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922–2014) American businessman

Variant: Product quality can then be defined as: The composite product characteristics of engineering and manufacturing that determine the degree to which the product, in use, will meet the expectations of the customer.
Source: Total Quality Control, 1983, p. 7

Karl Marx photo

“Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 10.

Ragnar Frisch photo
Mark Skousen photo
Karl Marx photo

“The aggregate capital appears as the capital stock of all individual capitalists combined. This joint stock company has in common with many other stock companies that everyone knows what he puts in, but not what he will get out of it.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. II, Ch. XX, p. 437.
(Buch II) (1893)

Murray N. Rothbard photo

Related topics