Robert Scott, Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Great Thinkers in Economics), by Robert Scott. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 224 pp., £68.00 (hardback).
Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a deeply original economist and polymath. This biography by Robert H. Scott, associate professor of economics and finance at Monmouth University, is the first to cover Boulding's entire life.
- After a brief overview (chapter 1), the book offers a largely chronological journey through Boulding's life and writings.
- Chapter 2 details his childhood in a devout Methodist working-class family in wartime Liverpool, which planted the seed for his lifelong religious and pacifist convictions, and also covers his beginnings in economics at Oxford.
- Chapter 3 tracks Boulding's early rise to fame as a respectable economist in the United States, portrays his wife Elise, and discusses his Quaker writings, which, Scott argues, “are in many ways inseparable” from his economic writings yet “have been downplayed until this book” (xi, 73).
- Boulding's transformation into a transdisciplinary social scientist and moral philosopher is described in chapter 4, which covers his years at the University of Michigan (1949–1967). During this time, he pioneered both general systems theory and peace and conflict research, and wrote the classic essay The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.
- Chapter 5 begins with Boulding's move to Boulder, Colorado, and ends with his forced retirement from the University of Colorado in 1980. Matters discussed here include Boulding's presidential address to the American Economic Association, his attempt to establish grants economics as a broadening of mainstream economics, and his evolutionary systems thinking.
- Chapter 6 discusses a selection of Boulding's articles in the Technology Review magazine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a wide range of topics. It also discusses his years in retirement, no less productive than his university days, including writings on power theory and critique of mainstream economics.
- The brief final chapter discusses Boulding's place in the history of economic thought and assesses his intellectual legacy.
Boulding's output was prolific, as befits someone whose cardinal principle was “Don't get it right, get it written” (xiii), and, as Scott amusingly reveals, liked to dictate his work in the hammock using a dictaphone, leaving his secretary to do the transcription with some difficulty since “he would go to sleep for various periods and awake randomly to dictate some more” (86). Scott covers a wide spectrum of Boulding's work, citing some two dozen books, a dozen journal articles, fifteen Quaker articles, and reproducing several of his poems (and even three by his mother!). However, although this biography forms part of a series on Great Thinkers in Economics, Boulding's economics receives rather superficial treatment. For example, it is not clearly stated what Boulding's own contribution was to what he liked to call the ‘K-theory’ of distribution — after Keynes, Kalecki, Kaldor, and Kenneth (174). As another example, Boulding's liquidity preference theory of market prices, which “he often referred to as his most important economics article” (60), would have benefited from further clarification. The treatment of this article also exemplifies a general shortcoming of the book, namely the weakly contextualized account of Boulding's work. We learn
a great deal about Boulding's relation to his mother and his wife, but much less about whose work he built upon, what professional colleagues he interacted with, or how his work was received. We do learn about Boulding's social and political values, such as his progressive stance on race. However, the claim that “for most of his years in America he was a registered Republican” (6) appears at odds with Mott's (2000, F436) account of him changing his voter registration to Republican only after moving to Colorado in 1967. That he resigned this membership in 1981, in protest against Reagan's nuclear build-up and the party's loss of “true conservatism” (157, citing Boulding), is clear.
Scott discusses Boulding's Spaceship Earth essay (published 1966) in some length, and maintains that “within this paper are the beginnings of modern ecological economics” (187). His claim that “Boulding's Spaceship Earth was the first to integrate concepts such as entropy and the second law of thermodynamics into economic thinking” (186–7) lacks the qualification among post-WWII writers, and Scott could have noted the historical irony that, as a chemistry student at Oxford, Boulding slept through the uninspiring lectures of his main predecessor in this regard, Frederick Soddy (Daly, 1996; 239 n4), whose economics had fallen into oblivion by the 1960s. Scott is diplomatically dismissive of Spash's (2013) lowering of Boulding in the pantheon of ecological economists, and does not register that Boulding's essay “does not address the social and political factors or structural issues driving economic growth and environmental degradation” (Spash, 2013: 355). Boulding's neglect of these issues is surely related to his aversion to Marxism and his ambivalence towards institutional economics; matters on which Scott makes some scattered observations (see Wray, 1994, for a more incisive critical commentary).
As reflected in the book's title, Boulding came to see himself “as a voice crying in the wilderness, to which nobody has paid much attention” (Boulding, 1971: viii). Scott is nevertheless upbeat about the continued relevance of Boulding's work, but does not go to great lengths to explain its limited impact. With respect to economics, that Boulding's transdisciplinary thinking and “sharp divergence from mainstream thinking left him on an island unto himself” (189) is accurate, and Scott also follows Heilbroner (1975) in noting that Boulding's high level of abstraction did not generate researchable hypotheses. I would have liked to find more discussion of other potential factors, such as what part the self-contained nature of Boulding's grand system of thought, associated with his “nonconfronting manner” of not directly challenging the ideas of others (Troub, 1978: 520), may have played. Furthermore, Boulding – devoted to “the prospering of truth” (130–3) – comes across as profoundly modernist, and the effects of postmodernism on the fate of his approach to the unity of the social sciences might have been worth consideration. Boulding has been relatively influential in ecological economics, but there are important aspects of his work that deserve a closer look also by scholars in this field. This includes his balance sheet analysis and his monetary theory (see Wray, 1997, for an appraisal), the relevance of which is becoming clearer as ecological economists increasingly look to post-Keynesian economics to develop an ecological macroeconomics.
2 Book Review
This book is a useful introduction to Kenneth Boulding, although, owing to its sparse treatment of economics, weak contextualization, and some overly compressed and repetitious writing, I did not find it particularly engrossing.
I would sooner recommend the recent selection of Boulding's writings followed by commentaries by other scholars (Dolfsma and Kesting, 2013), which, moreover, despite its size is less of an investment as a paperback, whereas there are no plans for a paperback of this biography.
References
Boulding, K.E., 1971. Introduction. In: Glahe, F.R. (Ed.), Collected Papers of Kenneth E. Boulding vol. I. Colorado Associated University Press, Boulder.
Daly, H.E., 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Beacon Press, Boston.
Interdisciplinary Economics: Kenneth E. Boulding's Engagement in the Sciences. In: Dolfsma, W., Kesting, S. (Eds.), Routledge, Abingdon.
Heilbroner, R.L., 1975. Kenneth Boulding, collected papers: a review article. J. Econ. Issues 9 (1), 73–79.
Mott, T., 2000. Kenneth Boulding, 1910–1993. Econ. J. 110 (June), F430–F444.
Spash, C.L., 2013. Comment: the economics of Boulding's spaceship earth. In: Dolfsma, W., Kesting, S. (Eds.), , pp. 348–363.
Troub, R.M., 1978. Kenneth Boulding: economics from a different perspective. J. Econ. Issues 12 (2), 501–528.
Wray, L.R., 1994. Kenneth Boulding's grants economics. J. Econ. Issues 28 (4), 1205–1225. Wray, L.R., 1997. Kenneth Boulding's reconstruction of macroeconomics. Rev. Soc. Econ. 55 (4), 445–463.
Kristofer Dittmer
Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Spain
E-mail address: kristofer.dittmer@outlook.com
17 April 2015 Available online xxxx
