Some of Boulding's Work is as Close to Timeless as Economists Get
Will Future Generations Read His Work?

Don Roper   Aug04

With 40 or so books and over 1000 articles it is inevitable that Boulding's published work is not of uniform quality.
I find, for example, that his often repeated to represent such a high level of generality that I, at least, find it unuseful. And I can't understand why he thought he could facilitate changes in the perspectives of the intellectual community by frequently invoking the elementary calculus that the net change in a stock equals additions minus substractions. He at least invoked it with humor by calling it the 'bathtub theorem."

But even if we discard a substantial part of his work, the output is still prodigious and, for me, his best work transcends time better than any economist I know of.

Let me distinguish between famous "period pieces" and more timeless contributions. Compare, for example,

According to Boulding (1978), "Economic Analysis established my respectability so that I have been able to be disreputable ever since." It is his 'disreputable' work (e.g., Reconstruction, published after the 1st two editions of Economic Analysis) which is important today and, as long as the profession continues to ignore his arguments, will be relevant tomorrow as well.

Many graduate students learned the analytics of mainstream (genre 'forties and 'fifties) economics from Economic Analysis. But as well received as his textbook was, we do not expect to find, for example, Euler's 250 year old condition for dynamic optimization which, since the 'eighties, has become a standard item in most first year mainstream graduate programs. His text is, I suggest, a "period piece" reflecting the mathematical tools in fashion at the time.

But his Reconstruction (as well as his 1944 paper, "Liquidity Preference as a Theory of Prices") is a different matter -- it rings as true today as it did when it was published in 1950. In this work he issued a call for economists to give less weight to "maximizing behavior" and more weight to the homeostasis of the balance sheet to explain firm behavior. And for macroeconomic he insisted, in particular, that "consumption" be seen as the destruction of a stock -- as in the depletion of fossil fuels and minerals.

And what promotes welfare? Boulding emphasized the homeostasis of the body, not the satiation of our appetites to the point where "marginal utility" equals price. According to Boulding's 1969 AEA presidential address

"One of the most peculiar illusions of economists is the doctrine of what might be called the "Immaculate Conception" of the indifference curve, that is, the doctrine that tastes are simply given and we cannot inquire into the process by which they are formed. This doctrine is literally "for the birds," whose tastes are largely created for them by their genetic structures and can therefore be treated as a constant in the dynamics of bird societies."
His view that tastes should be endogenized as part of the social system is part of Boulding's longtime interest in integrating economics with a larger body of social science -- the 'general systems theory' with which he was long associated.

His two most widely cited books, The Images (1956) and Conflict and Defense (1962), again epitomize the difference between a timeless work and a period piece. Conflict and Defense was, like Economic Analysis, primarily an exercise in the mainstream tools of the time. The peace community in Boulder and the peacestudies program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which the Bouldings did so much to promote and in which I've participated for almost two decades, does not, to my knowledge, cite Boulding's work in Conflict and Defense.

Boulding's greatness comes, I suggest, from his efforts to identify (or even shape) the dominate forces that govern social evolution over long periods of time. An obvious example of his identification of a major force in social evolution is his focus on entropy and throughout which are brought to our attention via his 1965 contribution of the metaphor "spaceship earth." Consumption, again, is the destruction of assets; therefore, the economical way to enhance the longevity of the spaceship is to keep consumption/throughput as low as possible while maintaining "ecological homeostasis." Boulding will have to share honors for that phrase with Barbara Ward and Buckminster Fuller. The metaphor will continue to be powerful as long as the Economics profession continues to treat GDP growth as a "good" where GDP is enhanced by more rapid extraction of minerals and fossil fuels.

Accurate identification of major forces shaping long-term societal evolution requires minimal ideological blinders -- a serious effort to overcome one's inclination to confuse hopes with predictions. One must be neither optimistic nor pessimistic -- genuine realism is essential in any accurate identification of the most powerful evolutionary forces.

In this vein one important observation that Boulding made, once in an article in Commentary in 1985 and in his last book (Structure of the American Economy) published in 1993, was that profits in corporate America were being eroded by interest on debt as shown in Boulding's graphic on the right. His worries about corporate overindebtedness were realized in the bankruptcies in the rise of bankruptcies this century.

But Boulding may have introduced his hopes for less conflict in his mental voyages into the more distant future. One of his beliefs is that the nuclear bomb made major warfare obsolete. His abhorrence of conflict led him to not give more serious reflection to the writings of Marx who saw a possible social good arising from violent struggle against capitalist oppression. Despite having been, along with most of his classmates, a socialist as an Oxford undergraduate, Boulding never gave Marxist thought (and the Marxist emphasis on conflict between labor and capital) serious intellectual attention. Marxists, consequently, have rarely if ever found it necessary to 'answer' Boulding's view of the future. The thoughts of two of the intellectual giants concerned with a near-identical issue -- societal evolution -- were, unfortunately, never joined in debate.

Rather than an accurate description of long-term societal evolution, I read Boulding as providing a somewhat optimistic rendition of what is possible. Consider Boulding's (1981) argument that

... we cannot "ask" an electron where it is without changing its position. Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it.
This suggests that if we envision a future without major warfare we are more likely to achieve that future. As his most widely read work, Images, suggests -- the images that we hold are critical influences on the future that we evolve.

By invoking Heisenberg-like uncertainty into social "science," Boulding appears to be questioning what many 'scientists' regard as an essential criterion of science -- the testing of hypotheses on future data -- the predictive power of theory. But note the use of the pronoun "we" in the preceding quote. If Boulding is unable to "predict the future without changing it," that must be due to his influence -- that "Boulding's predictions" might become so widespread that they influence the future. While it was always delightful to interact with my colleague, Kenneth -- while he never wore his ego on his sleeve -- I suggest that, in fact, he did indeed have a very high opinion of just how far his ideas might (and certainly ought to) spread.

Boulding's identification of the dominant forces of social evolution is facilitated in no small part by his ability to discern commonalities between seemingly disparate notions. It is the process of bringing hitherto unrecognized commonalities into focus that, in my view, facilitates Boulding's identification of subtle but profound forces (such as Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere re-articulated by Boulding as "know how") driving evolution. Chapter V of The Image is online for those who would like a brief glimpse of Boulding's greatness.

In conclusion I would like to suggest that we use the web to bring the best of Boulding to the attention of younger generations. Boulding is well known for the 'grants economy' -- an expression of the idea that individual welfare often depends positively on the welfare of others. This leads to behavior outside the "exchange economy" which, before Boulding, was close to being the only domain of conventional Economic thought. There is an online, free encyclopedia, Wikipedia, brought to the world by the same ('open source') community that gave us linux. In the three years since Wikipedia began in 2001 there have been tens of thousands of contributors who have provided hundreds of thousands of short articles without receiving any thing in exchange. This is part of Boulding's grants economy rather than the exchange-economy of   Economics-before-Boulding.

click for source Articles on Wikipedia can be revised by anyone; consequently, names of authors typically disappear. Like open source code, Wiki articles tend to be an evolving group creation, not an exercise of market driven individuality. The explosive growth of this part of Boulding's 'grants economy' strongly suggests that it will be around in the distant future.

I hope that persons who think, like myself, that Boulding has much to say for future generations, will join me in making contributions about Boulding via Wikipedia.