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There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.

Kenneth E. Boulding

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Kenneth E. Boulding
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: January 18
Died: 1993
Died: March 18
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Economist
Philosopher
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City of Liverpool
Kenneth Ewart Boulding
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More quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding

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Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The concept of a value-free science is absurd.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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?
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Justification, in terms of the broadening of freedom, for any particular form of institution of property must be argued in terms of whether the losses caused by the restrictions imposed are greater or less than the gains derived from the elimination of costly conflict.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The perception of potential threats to survival may be much more important in determining behavior than the perceptions of potential profits, so that profit maximization is not really the driving force. It is fear of loss rather than hope of gain that limits our behavior.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
Kenneth E. Boulding