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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth E. Boulding

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Kenneth E. Boulding
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: January 18
Died: 1993
Died: March 18
Author
Economist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
City of Liverpool
Kenneth Ewart Boulding
Anyone
Believes
Believe
Mad
World
Economics
Exponential
Population
Overpopulation
Growth
Madman
Fun
Madmen
Either
Economist
Forever
Finite

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If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.
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Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.
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The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments
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We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.
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Where there is hypocrisy, there is hope.
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The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
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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.
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If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.
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Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
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The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
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Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.
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Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.
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Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
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Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
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Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? ... Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?
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Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.
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Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.
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Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it.
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[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.
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