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[The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?

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
Behavioral
Disciplines
Discipline
Question
Simply
Better

More quotes by 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 image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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If we saw tomorrow's newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Economists and technologists bring the bits, but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the wits.
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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Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The economy of the future might be called the spaceman economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[The consumer is] the supreme mover of economic order... for whom all goods are made and towards whom all economic activity is directed.
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 greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market... the higher the black market price.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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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[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.
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