Kenneth E Boulding

Youth and study

Boulding was born and raised at 4 Seymour Street in Liverpool, England, the first and only child of William C. Boulding and Elizabeth Ann Boulding. His father was a gasfitter and lay preacher in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, and his mother was a housewife. Boulding's middle name Ewart came from William Ewart Gladstone, of whom his father was a great admirer. In his adolescent years Boulding got interested in pacifism and joined the Religious Society of Friends.

After attending the all-boys grammar school Liverpool Collegiate School on a scholarship, Boulding won a chemistry scholarship to Oxford University. After studying Chemistry for a year in the summer of 1929, he transferred to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His economics tutors were Henry Phelps Brown, who at the end of the year went off to the University of Michigan, and Maurice Allen (1908-88), who would become director of the Bank of England in the late 1960s. Boulding eventually obtained his undergraduate degree with a First in economics in 1931. In his last year he had written a first article, entitled "The Place of the 'Displacement Cost' Concept in Economic Theory," which was accepted and published in The Economic Journal, after extensive comments by its editor John Maynard Keynes.

On a small university scholarship Boulding spent another year at Oxford doing graduate work, which resulted in a thesis on capital movements. While he was turned down a fellowship for Christ Church, Oxford, in 1932 he did win a Commonwealth Fellowship to the University of Chicago, which was delivered to him by Edward VIII, Prince of Wales 1910–1936, in person. With eight fellows he travelled first class on the RMS Laconia (1921), where he got "quite well acquainted" with Joseph Schumpeter, who had taken the same boat trip.

On the fellowship from 1932 to 1934, Boulding continued his economics studies at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University. He rejected a proposal by Jacob Viner to just take up his PhD studies; instead, he took classes from Henry Schultz and Frank Knight, and wrote some of his own articles. At the Chicago School he became friends with another graduate student, Albert Gailord Hart. In the summer of 1933, Boulding and two friends took a tour through the States in an old open Buick. At the Grand Canyon he received a cable that his father had died, so he returned to England that summer.

In the fall of 1933 back in the States Boulding studied with Joseph Schumpeter, until he felt ill with a spontaneous pneumothorax. After recovery he spent the last six months of this Commonwealth Fellowship in Chicago, writing several articles especially on capital theory. Two of those articles "The Application of the Pure Theory of Population Change to the Theory of Capital," and "The Theory of a Single Investment," were published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1934-35, and were topic of Frank H. Knight reflection the next year. Boulding went back to the UK for three years to return to the States for good, where he was granted United States citizenship in 1948.

Early academic career in Edinburgh

Under the terms of his Commonwealth Fellowship Boulding returned to the UK in the summer of 1934, and obtained a job opening in economics at the University of Edinburgh, a three year-position. The academic life at the university seemed very dead to him, and he made himself unpopular with a speech to students that was published in The Scotsman with the headline "Scottish University Sitting on Haunches for the last Fifty Years."

In those days Boulding was actively involved in the Quaker community, writing "pamphlet on nonviolent methods in 1936 and drafting a letter for the Friends to the prime minister, asking Britain to disclaim the “war guilt” clauses in the Treaty of Versailles and move toward a more just peace."

An other highlights in those days was, that he learn about Paton's accounting theory and the principles of accounting. Methods such as balance sheets had never crossed his desk in Oxford. This theory made him see the firm as "governed by a principle that might be called the homeostasis of the constant changing balance sheet," Boulding (1989) explained: "In the short run, the firm simply responded to changes in the balance sheet resulting from purchases. When customers purchased finished goods, inventory went down, cash went up, and the cash would be spent on labour and materials to make more finished goods. This equilibrium balance sheet, however, would be constantly changing as technologies, new goods, and new enterprises came into play."

In 1935, in his second year in Edinburgh, Frank H. Knight published an article on his work, entitled "The theory of investment once more: Mr. Boulding and the Austrians," in The Quarterly Journal of Economics. This brought Boulding at the age of 24 into prominence as notable intellectual in the social sciences.

Academic life at Colgate University

In the summer of 1937 Boulding was back in the States to attend a world congres of Quakers in Philadelphia, when he obtained a faculty position upstate New York at the Colgate University. From 1937 to 1941 there he taught economics. Fontaine (2010) summarized his stay:

"... Boulding enjoyed the congenial surroundings of Colgate University. He did not feel alienated from his colleagues and acquaintances, as he had in British academic circles. For the first two years, social and professional life was fulfilling. But from September 1939, the invasion of Poland and his home country’s declaration of war on Germany caused increasing emotional distress and strong feelings of hate against the Germans. His Quaker convictions were shaken until he had a mystical experience in May 1940 which restored his faith in pacifism..."

In a state of spiritual crisis Boulding managed to finish his textbook, Economic Analysis, which he had started in the free summer semesters at Colgate in the two years before. This work would become a bestseller and earned him even more respect in the field of economics.

Later academic career in the States

From 1942 to 1943, Boulding taught at Fisk University. From 1945 to 1949 he was a faculty member of Iowa State College, now Iowa State University; and during the years 1949 to 1967, he was a faculty member of the University of Michigan. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he remained until his retirement.

Boulding was president of numerous scholarly societies including the American Economic Association, the Society for General Systems Research, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Kenneth Boulding was nominated for the Nobel Prize for both peace and economics.

Religious Society of Friends

Boulding, with his wife Elise, was an active member of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. He took part in Quaker gatherings, served on committees, and spoke to and about the Friends. The two were members of meetings in Nashville, Tennessee, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Boulder, Colorado. Interestingly, although he stuttered, when he ministered in a Friends meeting, he spoke clearly. Kenneth Boulding was instrumental in organizing the first Teach-In relating to the Vietnam War at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in March, 1965. He later spoke on the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University and was pelted with snowballs by a group of disagreeing students.

In March 1977, he even conducted a silent vigil at the headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia to protest what he considered its distancing itself from Quakers. He penned the widely circulated "There is a Spirit," a series of sonnets he wrote in 1945 based on the last statement of the 17th century Quaker James Nayler.

Work

Boulding was not only a prolific writer and a creative integrator of knowledge, but an academician of world stature—indeed, a magisterial figure in the discipline of social science. For Boulding, economics and sociology were not social sciences—rather, they were all aspects of a single social science devoted to the study of human persons and their relationships (organizations). Boulding spearheaded an evolutionary (instead of equilibrium) approach to economics.

Boulding emphasized that human economic and other behavior is embedded in a larger interconnected system. To understand the results of our behavior, economic or otherwise, we must first research and develop a scientific understanding of the ecodynamics of the general system, the global society in which we live, in all its dimensions spiritual and material. Boulding believed that in the absence of a committed effort to the right kind of social science research and understanding, the human species might well be doomed to extinction. But he died optimistic, believing our evolutionary journey had just begun.

In addition to economics, Boulding made important contributions to the fields of political science, sociology, philosophy, and social psychology.

Economic Analysis, 1941

Boulding's first major work in economics was his introductory textbook, entitled Economic Analysis. It was written in the time he was instructor at Colgate University in the late 1930s and first appeared in 1941 with Harper & Brothers as single and two-volume edition. This work was extended and republished in four editions, the last in 1966. In a 1942 book review Max Millikan explained the books was published on the right time and the right place. According to Millikan (1942):

"For some years there has been a yawning gap in the literature of economic theory between the very elementary text designed for beginning students and the clutter of specialized monographs and periodical articles accessible only to the fully trained economist. The teacher attempting to lead his charges over this difficult and dangerous terrain has had to choose between two unsatisfactory alternatives. He could devote all his time to formal lecturing about a subject that requires informal discussion and problems for its proper comprehension; or he could assign and discuss a hodgepodge of advanced books and articles in the hope, usually vain, that some fraction of the class would struggle through to a comprehension of some fraction of the material."

Millikan (1942) concluded that Boulding's work had filled the gap "neatly and effectively... material is organized by tools of analysis and the problems in the solution of which those tools are useful rather then in the conventional manner." In the preface Boulding had explained himself, that the book was "intended as a text from which the student can learn and the teacher can teach the methods and results of economic analysis. It also seeks to be a contribution to the development and systematization of the body of economic analysis itself."

Looking back Boulding (1989) explained, that "the first edition fundamentally followed Irving Fisher and Keynes's Treatise on Money. Even though I had read Keynes's General Theory by that time, I think I had not really understood it. I am not quite sure that I do now. The second edition, however, in 1948, was a thoroughly Keynesian general theory." The first edition was published during the start of World War II and didn't sell that well, but the second revised edition did and became "one of the core textbooks used in college in the United States (and eventually around the world)."

Evolutionary economics

Boulding was the key exponent of the evolutionary economics movement. In his “Economic Development as an Evolutionary System” (1961, 1964), Boulding suggests a parallel between economic development and biological evolution.

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 manifests 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.

The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966

Following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, the developing environmental movement drew attention to the relationship between economic growth and development and environmental degradation. Boulding in his influential 1966 essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth identified the need for the economic system to fit itself to the ecological system with its limited pools of resources.

One of the first uses of the term sustainable in the contemporary sense was by the Club of Rome in 1972 in its classic report on the Limits to Growth, written by a group of scientists led by Dennis and Donella Meadows of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Describing the desirable "state of global equilibrium", the authors wrote: "We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is sustainable without sudden and uncontrolled collapse and capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people."

Publications

Boulding published some thirty books and more than eight hundreds articles. Listing of books:

1940s to 1960s

1941, Economic Analysis, Harper & Brothers; 3rd single edition, 1955 ;4th ed. part II, 1966

1942, A Peace Study Outline: The Practice of the Love of God, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Book Committee

1945, The Economics of Peace, Prentice Hall.

1945, There is a Spirit: The Nayler Sonnets, Fellowship Publications.

1950, A Reconstruction of Economics, J. Wiley.

1953, The Organizational Revolution: A Study in the Ethics of Economic Organization, Harper & Brothers.

1956, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society, University of Michigan Press.

1958, The Skills of the Economist, Cleveland: Howard Allen.

1958, Principles of Economic Policy, Prentice-Hall, 1958.

1962, Conflict and Defence: A General Theory, Harper & Bros.

1964, The Meaning of the Twentieth Century: the Great Transition, Harper & Row.

1966 The Impact of the Social Sciences, Rutgers University Press

1966, “The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics.” American Economic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1/2, Mar. 1, 1966: 1-13

1968, Beyond Economics: Essays on Society, Religion, and Ethics, (University of Michigan Press)

1969, “The Grants Economy,” Michigan Academician (Winter)

1970s

1970, Economics as a Science, (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

1970, A Primer on Social Dynamics: History as Dialectics and Development, (Free Press, 1970).

1971, Economics, Colorado Associated University Press, 1971.

1973, Political Economy, Colorado Associated University Press, 1973.

1973, The Economy of Love and Fear: A Preface to Grants Economics, Wadsworth.

1974, Toward a General Social Science, Colorado Associated University Press.

1975, International Systems: Peace, Conflict Resolution, and Politics, Colorado Associated University Press.

1975, Sonnets from the Interior Life, and Other Autobiographical Verse, Colorado Associated University Press.

1978, Stable Peace, University of Texas Press.

1978, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution, Sage.

1980s to 1993

1980, Beasts, Ballads, and Bouldingisms: A Collection of Writings, Transaction Books.

1981, Evolutionary Economics, London: Sage.

1981, A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear. New York: Praeger.

1985, Toward the Twenty-First Century: Political Economy, Social Systems, and World Peace, Colorado Associated University Press.

1985, Human Betterment, Sage.

1985, The World as a Total System, Sage.

1986, Mending the World: Quaker Insights on the Social Order, Pendle Hill Publications.

1989, Three Faces of Power, Sage.

1992, Towards a New Economics: Critical Essays on Ecology, Distribution, and Other Themes, Edward Elgar.

1993, The Structure of a Modern Economy: the United States, 1929-89, Macmillan.

Articles, a selection

Some of his most cited works:

Boulding, Kenneth E. "General systems theory—the skeleton of science." Management science 2.3 (1956): 197-208; Online at panarchy.org, 2000-17.

Boulding, Kenneth E. "National images and international systems." Journal of Conflict Resolution 3.2 (1959): 120-131.

Boulding, Kenneth E. "The economics of the coming spaceship earth." Environmental Quality Issues in a Growing Economy (1966).

Boulding, Kenneth E. "Economics as a moral science." The American Economic Review 59.1 (1969): 1-12.

Boulding, Kenneth E. "Evolutionary economics." Journal of Business Ethics 2 (2):160-162 (1983).