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Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

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
Figment
Figments
Equilibrium
Imagination
Human
Humans

More quotes by 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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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 controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
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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One advantage of exhibiting a hierarchy of systems in this way is that it gives us some idea of the present gaps in both theoretical and empirical knowledge. Adequate theoretical models extend up to about the fourth level, and not much beyond. Empirical knowledge is deficient at practically all levels.
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 right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
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 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 and technologists bring the bits, but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the wits.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.
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?
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.
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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Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit
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