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1910–1993 United States
Kenneth Ewart Boulding (18 January 1910 – 18 March 1993) was an economist, educator, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science.
United States Economists Philosophers Also known as: Kenneth E. Boulding
Random Kenneth Boulding quote
88 quotes
The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.
p. 800 cited in: P. Lloyd (2012)
Economics deals with the behavior of commodities rather than with the behavior of men.
Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.
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.
We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.
p. 87 quote in: D.A. Bella (1978)
Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
to Kenneth Boulding in: Association of American Colleges (1955)
Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits."
A system is anything that is not chaos, and even though history seems highly chaotic at times, we have an intuitive feeling that it is not pure chaos.
Integrative power [is] the ultimate power
The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.
Kenneth Boulding (1957)
Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself
The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
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
p. 141 as cited in John Laurent (2003)
Production functions involving only land, labor and capital... never work and never explain economic development.
Kenneth Boulding (1990)
“In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.”
“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.”
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 Boulding (1986)
I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.
The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market... the higher the black market price.
Kenneth Boulding (1947)
The process of consumption... is the final act in the economic drama
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