Remembering Elise Boulding: The Legacy of Her Journaling - Friends Journal

Remembering Elise Boulding: The Legacy of Her Journaling - Friends Journal



Remembering Elise Boulding: The Legacy of Her Journaling


December 1, 2011

By Mary Lee Morrison


Elise Boulding died on June 24, 2010, in Needham, Mass., just shy of her 90th birthday. Known for her accomplishments in many areas, she was a scholar, teacher, author, activist, mother, and long-time member of the Religious Society of Friends. She was a leader in founding three important fields of academic inquiry: women’s, peace, and futures studies. Her life spoke to the integration of peace research, education and action. Elise left a lasting legacy in her many writings, including over 300 publications: scholarly books and chapters, poetry, speeches, letters and several Pendle Hill Pamphlets. Elise kept a journal, beginning in her early adolescence and continuing until shortly before her death. Excerpts from these entries illuminate the deep spiritual struggles and triumphs that she experienced throughout her life.

I began my friendship with Elise Boulding during the last fifteen years of her life through researching and writing a full length biography of her, a published revision of my doctoral research in educational studies with a focus on peace studies. I was blessed with periods of extended conversations with her over the course of several years of the research. During this time Elise opened her journals and private papers to me. I am grateful to the surviving Boulding children and especially to Russell Boulding for his permission to use and to quote from this material.
Brief Biographical Overview

Elise Boulding was born in Oslo, Norway in 1920 and immigrated to the United States as a three-year-old with her parents, Birgit (Johnsen) and Joseph Biörn-Hansen. Sociologist emeritus from the University of Colorado and Dartmouth College, she is often considered the matriarch of the 20th century peace research movement. Her writings on women, on the importance of the family in creating a more peaceful world, on the power of visioning for a more peaceful future, and on the role of linking local and regional organizations to create a more interdependent global planet are considered seminal. A consummate networker and world traveler, particularly in her middle and later years as her academic career expanded, she saw herself first and foremost as an educator, as a global citizen, and as a mother, with her roots grounded in her family and in her community, though her international reputation was considerable.

Elise Boulding’s long marriage and fruitful partnership with Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding, including some of the conflicts that she experienced in their relationship, helped to contribute to the development of her ideas on cultures of peace for which she was best known during the latter years of her life. Calling herself a homemaker for the first eighteen years of her marriage, she was an activist and a peace educator before she became a more formal academic scholar in her mid-forties. These early involvements included rising to become International Chair of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1967 and work with American Friends Service Committee, which lasted for many years.

Grounded in the Religious Society of Friends during her adult years, Elise’s spiritual journey encompassed ecumenism. Finding Friends during college and marrying Kenneth Boulding in 1941, he who was already a well-known Quaker economist and poet, were epiphanies for Elise, helping to solidify her spiritual seeking and laying the grounding for her future life and work. Elise’s faith journey began as a Norwegian immigrant who was born into a nominally Lutheran family, and as a young girl she sought out a local Protestant church. An early journal entry notes that for one day during adolescence she became a Christian Scientist, quickly deciding that was not the spiritual path for her. At that time she wrote in her journal that she would make her own religion.

Joining Quakers at age 21, she quickly became a well-known member of the Religious Society of Friends. Prior to the birth of the first of their five children, Elise and Kenneth were members of Princeton (N.J.) and Nashville (Tenn.) Friends Meetings. Russell, their oldest child, was born in 1947 and they were members of Ames (Iowa) Meeting at that time. Four more children followed in quick succession: Mark, Christine, Philip and William. The family was active in the Ann Arbor (Mich.) and Boulder (Colo.) Friends Meetings, having relocated to Michigan in the early 1950s for Kenneth to take a faculty position in economics at the university. In 1967 they settled in Boulder where both Kenneth and Elise took positions at the University of Colorado. In addition Elise worshiped with Hanover, N.H., Friends during her time teaching at Dartmouth College in the 1970s and 1980s, later becoming a member of Wellesley (Mass.) Meeting when she moved to the Boston area in 1996. In her middle and later years Elise sought out Catholic monasteries and worshiped and worked with Buddhists, and as her interest in ecumenism grew, she represented Quakers at the international gatherings of the Interfaith Peace Council in the 1990s.
Periods of Retreat

Despite her exuberance for life, Elise struggled with dark periods throughout her life. The price of her over-extension was times of exhaustion, both physical and emotional. At these times she would retreat into journal writing, into visits to Catholic monasteries, and once to a year’s solitude in a little cabin she’d had built for her in the Colorado mountainside where her first full length scholarly book was written. This was a history of the world’s women, The Underside of History: A View of Women Through Time (1976). The legacy of many of these times of darkness came to fruition in her spiritual memoir "Born Remembering", published both as Pendle Hill Pamphlet 200 (1975) and in her fulllength book on families, One Small Plot of Heaven: Reflections on Family Life by a Quaker Sociologist, published in 1989 by Pendle Hill.
Journal Entries

In 1973 Elise jotted in her journal that she had had a good talk with Quaker scholar Douglas Steere, who had come to lecture at the monastery where she was on retreat. It was during this period of time that she was wrestling with her commitment to stay with the Religious Society of Friends.


He has come to the same view of Quakerism that I have, that it has lost its sacramental quality through almost complete secularization of membership and non attention to scriptural experience, but he comes to the opposite conclusion about what to do about it. Instead of leaving the Society he would stay and try to bring it alive spiritually again. He reminded me that Quakerism was a social-religious mutation which the world would be poorer to lose. That was a good thing to remind me of, perhaps the one most effective thing he could have said.
A Year of Solitude

An entry from one of her first journal entries when she came to her Colorado hermitage for her year of solitude in January of 1974 notes the importance of letting go of some expectations: "I think that I have known all along that the thing that mustn’t happen is that I develop a compulsion about ‘something to show’ for this year."

This year of solitude was important to Elise in several ways. She had recently suffered from some physical illnesses which involved dizziness and inner ear complications as well as surgery for breast cancer. Her children were nearly grown, and her active roles in parenting were waning. Her scholarly career was increasingly demanding. She was a frequent speaker at Quaker gatherings, sometimes alone and sometimes with Kenneth. Philosophical differences on several key issues between Kenneth and Elise during their decades-long partnership created increasing stress for Elise. It was after a period of several years of the couple living and working apart, beginning with Kenneth’s retirement from the University of Colorado in the 1970s (she living in New Hampshire for a faculty position at Dartmouth and he staying in their home in Boulder), that the couple had a wonderful coming together in the last years of their marriage, through what Elise gratefully referred to as "Grace." This was the fruit of their more than fifty years together. Kenneth died in 1993.

Other journal entries of Elise’s from 1974 include several of the phrases for which she is known concerning the spirit of love:


If the human race brings itself to a premature conclusion it will be because we failed to learn the dynamics of love. Love isn’t intellectually respectable. If it were, we wouldn’t have the problems we do. It is because I love people that I love solitude. It is never too late to bring love into any relationship. I realize how much depends on the capacity for spontaneous loving and giving, how easy it is for all of us to be captured by our own sense of mission and forget whose mission we are on and that love must be the underlying motion of every act or the act is self-neutralizing. It comes from god.

In 1976, a journal entry relates to her having begun her scholarly exploration into futures studies:


My calling lies in exploring the human condition in the context of much greater time spans that I am now dealing with.

In a few years her theories on visioning and on the "200 Year Present" would culminate in the publication of her seminal book on global education, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (1988).
A Seminal Dream

In 1978 the Bouldings’ youngest son, William, was married. This event marked the end, to Elise, of her child rearing days. This was also the time at which she accepted a permanent faculty position at Dartmouth. At the time of the wedding, a dream came to Elise, revealed in the following verse, a trajectory for the rest of her life:


9 years teaching
9 years thru practice preaching
9 years heavenward reaching

She was told in the dream that she was to continue her academic teaching for nine more years. She would then spend nine years in "preaching," meaning her focus would be spiritual. Elise believed that the final nine years of her life would be "heaven-reaching," that is preparing for death. True to the spirit of her intentional living, this vision was, in many ways, carried out.

Elise retired from Dartmouth in 1985 and continued part time teaching for several more years after returning to Boulder. The years following retirement, after her "nine years of teaching," was her time of "preaching," although, of course, she had already had a long history of speaking and writing with the Religious Society of Friends and with other faith groups. During this time Elise was involved in many Quaker activities in her monthly and yearly meetings and helped to develop the Friends Peace Teams project, supporting the work of the African Great Lakes Initiative as well as helping to develop and implement the idea of local centers of peace in the United States.

A synthesis of Elise’s ideas through decades of research, teaching, and writing culminated in her book Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History, published in 2000. In her words, a culture of peace is a culture that promotes peaceable diversity, dealing creatively with the conflicts and differences that appear in every society, because no two human beings are alike.

In 2000, Elise moved to North Hill, a retirement home in Needham, Mass., near her daughter Christine’s home outside of Boston. Her last years were to be "heavenward reaching." In actuality, she outlived her dream timeline, since she thought she would reach, and was preparing for, the end of her life in 2005. Elise continued her "practice preaching" well into the new millennium, despite some significant health issues. It was at the end of her life that she was able to fully find peace, to let go of some of the stresses and anxieties which contributed both to her periods of despair and to the rich legacy she left us of her teaching, writing and speaking. Her son, Russell, believes that it was Alzheimer’s disease (with which she was diagnosed several years before her death) leading to her increasing cognitive decline, that finally enabled Elise to fully experience her "heavenward reaching," to let go of her high selfexpectations, and to experience her final inner healing and the victory she had long sought: living in "the now" of God’s love.


April 2008
Wakened from an afternoon nap with a
Wellspring of Love arising in my heart!
What an incredible gift!
The branches of the trees blowing gently in the wind outside my window are pregnant
With buds getting ready to open up—but not yet!
But getting ready!
The Holy Spirit is blessing our Earth and all of us living creatures on it.
Thank you Holy Spirit!

In late May 2010, shortly before her death, Elise received one of her regular visits from Virginia Benson, Senior Research Fellow of the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue, a Buddhist- inspired educational and dialogue center located in Cambridge, Mass. Elise enjoyed a fifteen-year relationship with the Ikeda Center (formerly known as the Boston Research Center for the Twenty-First Century), beginning shortly before her move to the New England in the mid-90s and continuing until her death. Her last book, Into Full Flower: Making Peace Cultures Happen, a series of dialogues with the center’s founder Daisaku Ikeda, was published in 2010. In the words of Ginny Benson: "Elise was talking to me as she lay there looking up at the trees in the wind. Her words sounded so poetic that I wrote them down verbatim and arranged them like a poem. Her expansive spirit joined the trees ‘dancing in the sky.’ This joyous ode is to the trees, to the ‘now’ and to her love of networking."


Everything is in the now.
The trees and the sky
And you and I
We’re in the now!
See the wind dancing in the trees.
Or is it the trees dancing in the wind?
Trees can’t dance without the wind
The wind can’t dance without the trees.
We all need each other
And I need you
And you need me.
So happy
I could lie here forever
But I won’t
I’m heavenward seeking.
For me, this is the perfect place
I could live up in the top of that tree
I can send myself up there on the top.
Now I’m waving in the wind.
Everything needs everything.

Near the end of Into Full Flower, Elise’s words speak to our future as humanity. "There is a spirit in each of us that will make it possible for us to learn to live together as a family on this planet. First we must learn to listen to that spirit and to one another." A memorial service was held for Elise Boulding on July 6, 2010, on what would have been her 90th birthday, in the chapel at Wellesley College under the care of Wellesley Friends Meeting.

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Mary Lee Morrison

Mary Lee Morrison, a member of Hartford (Conn.) Meeting, is a writer and educator, community activist and volunteer, with interests in peace and global sustainablity and transformative pedagogy. She is the author of Elise Boulding: A Life in the Cause of Peace (2005). Further reading of the journals of Elise Boulding can be found at http://www.earthenergyhealing.org/EliseBoulding3.htm.

Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness by Robert Scott | Goodreads review, text

Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness by Robert Scott | Goodreads

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Great Thinkers in Economics
Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness


Robert Scott

4.00
1 rating1 review
This book summarizes the life and work of economist Kenneth E. Boulding. Boulding was a prolific writer, teacher and Quaker. Starting his career as an orthodox Keynesian economist, he eventually adopted a transdisciplinary approach to economic topics including peace, conflict and defense, environmental problems, human betterment and evolution.

GenresEconomics



219 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 2014
Displaying 1 of 1 review


Stuart McMillen
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July 30, 2018
A tenderly-written biography of economist Kenneth Boulding, which does a good job of conveying the scope of his life's work. Robert Scott's book ranges in scope from examinations of Boulding's enduring and loving relationships with his family members, through to overviews of his major intellectual contributions. For the first time, we see Kenneth Boulding's work as a peace activist and Quaker philosopher sitting beside his economics work.

At present, this is the only whole-of-life biography of Kenneth Boulding in existence, following his 1993 death. The other major biography to rival this is Creative Tension: the Life and Thought of Kenneth Boulding (1974) by Cynthia Kerman. Kerman's book is an expansive 344 pages, compared to Scott's restrained 187 pages. Because it was compiled during Boulding's life, Kerman gives a strong sense of being in the presence of the larger-than-life Boulding, with many observations about his personal style from his colleagues. The downside is that Kerman's biography feels more unfocused than Scott's well-structured book.

Robert Scott's A Voice Crying in the Wilderness charts the evolution of a unique and prolific intellectual, showing Boulding's evolution from economist into trans-disciplinary social scientist.
biography economics

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Kenneth Boulding, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

Robert Scott
Associate Professor, Monmouth University, USA

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1. An Introduction to Boulding
2. The Day the Liberals Won
3. Mr. Boulding and the Americans
4. Cosmogenesis
5. Where the Buffalo Roam
6. A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
7. Boulding’s Place in Economic History 
8. Postscript

===

About this book

This book summarizes the life and work of economist Kenneth E. Boulding. Boulding was a prolific writer, teacher and Quaker. Starting his career as an orthodox Keynesian economist, he eventually adopted a transdisciplinary approach to economic topics including peace, conflict and defense, environmental problems, human betterment and evolution.

===

Keywords

• Kenneth Boulding
• Interdisciplinary
• Economics
• Transdisciplinary
• Conflict and Defense
• Ecological Economics
• Elise Boulding
• Futurist
• Heterodox Economics
• Keynes
• Economic Growth
• Psychic Capital
• Quakers
• Oxford University
• conflict
• environment
• John Maynard Keynes

===

Preface xi

Acknowledgments                             xv

 

1     An Introduction to Boulding    1

2     The Day the Liberals Won       9

Bouldings and Rowes                          9

Baby Boulding Boy                            12

Pacifist Born                                    18

Quaker Beginnings                            21

Mark of the English Gentleman          22

Good-Byes                                      29

New College, Oxford                         30

3     Mr. Boulding and the Americans       35

Quaker Writings                                44

Economic Analysis                            48

Quavering Pacifism                           49

  Elise                                              51

Elise in Brief                                    53

League of Nations                             57

   Fisk                                               58

The Hawkeye State                           60

The Draft                                        62

  North                                             64

Disarmament and Disillusion             64

Psychic Capital                                 66

From Hawkeye to Wolverine              70

4 Cosmogenesis                            71

Ann Arbor, Michigan                          71

Within a Budding Grove                     72

Boulding’s Cosmogenesis                  74

Religion, Ethics, and Society              78

A Causal Shift                                  83

A Golden State of Mind                      85

Image Is Everything                         86

Society for General Systems Research                     92

  Center for Research on Conflict Resolution        92

So Much Trouble in the World            95

x Contents

Bessie	97
Conflict Resolution in Action	98
Land of the Rising Sun	99
Spaceship Earth	100
A Final Move	107
5 Where the Buffalo Roam	109
Boulder Bound Bouldings	109
A Difficult Move	109
Institute of Behavioral Science	111
Peace Starts at Home	114
Grants Economics	114
Chicago or Bust	119
Presidential Address	120
Quaker Writings	125
The Artist	133
The Professor	134
Manifesto	136
Retirement	138
6 A Voice Crying in the Wilderness	141
Early 1980s	142
Technology Review	143
The World as a Total System	160
Human Betterment	169
What Went Wrong with Economics	171
Power	174
Futurist Studies	177
Golden Anniversary	179
Sonnets en Mass	180
Death	181
Last Diary Entry	182
Afterlife	182
7 Boulding’s Place in Economic History	185
Peace and Conflict Resolution	185
Spaceship Earth	186
Boulding’s Legacy	187
Postscript	189
Bibliography	191
Index	197

Book review of Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Great Thinkers in Economics), by Robert Scott. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Kristofer Dittmer - Academia.edu

Book review of Kenneth Boulding: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Great Thinkers in Economics), by Robert Scott. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Kristofer Dittmer - Academia.edu

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

The Evolutionary Potential Of Quakerism Kenneth E. Boulding 1964

1964 Lecture.pdf

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Remembering Kenneth Boulding – 50 years after his Backhouse lecture - The Australian Friend 2014

Remembering Kenneth Boulding – 50 years after his Backhouse lecture - The Australian Friend

Remembering Kenneth Boulding – 50 years after his Backhouse lecture

3 Mar, 2014

Tom Louderback, 

Louisville Friends Meeting, Ohio Valley Yearly Meeting, Friends General Conference, USA

===

“What is the role of the Society of Friends, this tiny body of less than two hundred thousand people, in this great process stretching from creation to doomsday?” That profound question was posed by economist, philosopher, poet and Quaker Kenneth E. Boulding on January 5, 1964 during the James Backhouse Lecture series of the Australia Yearly Meeting 50 years ago. Later that same year, his lecture was published as Pendle Hill Pamphlet #136, entitled “The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism.”

Boulding was deeply interested in this question partly because his life’s work was founded on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Early in his career, his research in economics had sought similarities and connections between the social sciences and the natural sciences, particularly biology. His first book proposed “A Reconstruction of Economics.” Boulding’s research was groundbreaking as it turned out. A new scientific discipline developed a few years later out of this kind of inter-disciplinary research – Systems Science. Boulding is widely regarded as one of its founders. 

Systems Science holds that everything we find in our diverse and complex universe is subject to some type of organisation based on independent concepts and principles. Individually, everything around us is essentially a complex whole formed of related parts. These individual parts are, in turn, parts to higher level bodies or entities. That’s what the word “system” means in this scientific field. It’s not about electronic computers. Studies in Systems Science typically search for similarities, interactions, and connections among different kinds of things in nature. These studies examine everything, animate and inanimate, from atomic particles, to living organisms, to organisations created by living organisms, to stellar galaxies. But, most of the time they concentrate on more practical studies of the things we see around us, such as human beings and economic systems.

The new discipline grew out the great transformative scientific theories of the 19th and 20th centuries, among them Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In Darwin’s time, the word “evolution” referred to the progressive unfolding of embryonic structures like flower buds. The word implied that there was a progression of biological actions taking place in nature over time. Darwin was especially interested in how molecular changes, or mutations, occurred by inheritance and by adaptions to events in the environment. He saw evolution as a gradual step-by-step process of change. Organisms change not so much by rejecting old characteristics but by improving them; by adding new on top of old. Thus adaption is a critical survival skill.

By the 20th Century, a philosophy of organism had begun to develop in biology and the other life sciences that drew from observations of spontaneity in all fields of science. Nature is seen as alive and all things within it containing organising principles. The new view of evolution is not deterministic as the original concept of evolution had seemed.

Speaking on The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism in 1964, Boulding identified several fundamental characteristics which he traced to the development of Quakerism in the 1600s. The Quakers of that time were said to be persistent, sometimes stubborn, honest and practical minded. Whether accurate or not, these traits appear to be reflected in the Quaker approach to theology. The first fundamental characteristic Boulding saw in early Quakerism was perfectionism. Historically, Quakers have believed that perfection is a realistic goal in life. Some have termed this goal “salvation by character.” Other denominations are sometimes criticised for over-emphasizing salvation in Heaven. The early Quakers wanted to bring that goal into the here and now. Their refusal to participate in war is one to example of their commitment to perfection, Boulding points out.

Another characteristic Boulding saw in Quakerism was experimentalism. First-hand experience is said by Quakers to be the most authentic source of religion. This means that perfection cannot be accomplished just by studying and praying. You have to “practice what you preach” as the cliché goes. There was a sense among early Quakers that perfection and progress towards perfection happens by building new on top of old foundations. Old ideas are not rejected so much as they are improved by our actual experiences. This perception came to them about two hundred years before Darwin developed evolution. In that sense, Darwin himself was apparently building on an older idea. Today we know this as evolutionary change, as contrasted with revolutionary change. The first kind of change is thought to be peaceable while the second kind seems too often to resort to violence.

Boulding quote 1The third fundamental characteristic was a devotion to continuing revelation obtained by waiting worship, tempered by consensus, and put into practice. Early Quakers set about developing practices and organisations intended to transform knowledge, whether revealed, discerned, or learned, into actions which would further the aims of knowledge. For example, Quaker organisations typically write down their principles and practices and update them periodically. These charters were originally termed “books of discipline”, but in more recent times they are usually called “books of faith and practice.” Boulding adds, “It seems to have been the genius of George Fox himself however that created the Meeting for Business and or the organisation of the society into monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings. This gave it an apparatus, as it were, a body, capable of maintaining itself and of mobilising the scattered resources of individuals into a common purpose.”

Boulding saw these Quaker characteristics reflected in modern scientific methodology as hypothesis, experimentation, and the development of scientific theory. He believed the relationship between Quakerism and science was symbiotic, each drawing insights from other. More traditional denominations did not attempt to interact with science until the 20th century, he noted.

Nowadays, some believe that science and technology will eventually swallow up religion. They regard religion as a remnant of a pre-scientific era. They have no need of such “superstitions.” Boulding disagreed with that idea. He counters that many of those who would reject religion soon find themselves devising “quasi-religion out of some odds and ends of 19th Century social science.”

He continues, “I believe that the rules of reality testing which apply to ordinary experience apply alike to the religious experience of mankind and that a reality underlying this experience must be postulated, just as we postulate a reality underlying our carefully learned experience of the senses.”

Boulding eventually authored almost four dozen books, over 800 articles, and three volumes of poetry. Since 1990, the International Studies Association has granted the annual Kenneth E. Boulding Award in his honour.

** The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, Kenneth E. Boulding, 1966

The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth



THE ECONOMICS OF THE COMING SPACESHIP EARTH
By Kenneth E. Boulding, 1966

We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier. That is, there was always some place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of thc deterioration of the natural environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live. The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we find it hard to get rid of.

Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.

Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth. One hesitates to use the terms "open" and "closed" in this connection, as they have been used with so many different shades of meaning. Nevertheless, it is hard to find equivalents. The open system, indeed, has some similarities to the open system of von Bertalanffy, 1 in that it implies that some kind of a structure is maintained in the midst of a throughput from inputs to outputs. In a closed system, the outputs of all parts of the system are linked to the inputs of other parts. There are no inputs from outside and no outputs to the outside; indeed, there is no outside at all. Closed systems, in fact, are very rare in human experience, in fact almost by definition unknowable, for if there are genuinely closed systems around us, we have no way of getting information into them or out of them; and hence if they are really closed, we would be quite unaware of their existence. We can only find out about a closed system if we participate in it. Some isolated primitive societies may have approximated to this, but even these had to take inputs from the environment and give outputs to it. All living organisms, including man himself, are open systems. They have to receive inputs in the shape of air, food, water, and give off outputs in the form of effluvia and excrement. Deprivation of input of air, even for a few minutes, is fatal. Deprivation of the ability to obtain any input or to dispose of any output is fatal in a relatively short time. All human societies have likewise been open systems. They receive inputs from the earth, the atmosphere, and the waters, and they give outputs into these reservoirs; they also produce inputs internally in the shape of babies and outputs in the shape of corpses. Given a capacity to draw upon inputs and to get rid of outputs, an open system of this kind can persist indefinitely.

There are some systems -- such as the biological phenotype, for instance the human body-- which cannot maintain themselves indefinitely by inputs and outputs because of the phenomenon of aging. This process is very little understood. It occurs, evidently, because there are some outputs which cannot be replaced by any known input. There is not the same necessity for aging in organizations and in societies, although an analogous phenomenon may take place. The structure and composition of all organization or society, however, can be maintained by inputs of fresh personnel from birth and education as the existing personnel ages and eventually dies. Here we have an interesting example of a system which seems to maintain itself by the self-generation of inputs, and in this sense is moving towards closure. The input of people (that is, babies) is also all output of people (that is, parents).

Systems may be open or closed in respect to a number of classes of inputs and outputs. Three important classes are matter, energy, and information. The present world economy is open in regard to all three. We can think of the world economy or "econosphere" as a subset of the "world set," which is the set of all objects of possible discourse in the world. We then think of the state of the econosphere at any one moment as being the total capital stock, that is, the set of all objects, people, organizations, and so on, which are interesting from the point of view of the system of exchange. This total stock of capital is clearly an open system in the sense that it has inputs and outputs, inputs being production which adds to the capital stock, outputs being consumption which subtracts from it. From a material point of view, we see objects passing from the noneconomic into the economic set in the process of production, and we similarly see products passing out of the economic set as their value becomes zero. Thus we see the econosphere as a material process involving the discovery and mining of fossil fuels, ores, etc., and at the other end a process by which the effluents of the system are passed out into noneconomic reservoirs -- for instance, the atmosphere and the oceans -- which are not appropriated and do not enter into the exchange system.

From the point of view of the energy system, the econosphere involves inputs of available energy in the form, say, of water power, fossil fuels, or sunlight, which are necessary in order to create the material throughput and to move matter from the noneconomic set into the economic set or even out of it again; and energy itself is given off by the system in a less available form, mostly in the form of heat. These inputs of available energy must come either from the sun (the energy supplied by other stars being assumed to be negligible) or it may come from the earth itself, either through its internal heat or through its energy of rotation or other motions, which generate, for instance, the energy of the tides. Agriculture, a few solar machines, and water power use the current available energy income. In advanced societies this is supplemented very extensively by the use of fossil fuels, which represent as it were a capital stock of stored-up sunshine. Because of this capital stock of energy, we have been able to maintain an energy input into the system, particularly over the last two centuries, much larger than we would have been able to do with existing techniques if we had had to rely on the current input of available energy from the sun or the earth itself. This supplementary input, however, is by its very nature exhaustible.

The inputs and outputs of information are more subtle and harder to trace, but also represent an open system, related to, but not wholly dependent on, the transformations of matter and energy. By far the larger amount of information and knowledge is self-generated by the human society, though a certain amount of information comes into the sociosphere in the form of light from the universe outside. The information that comes from the universe has certainly affected man's image of himself and of his environment, as we can easily visualize if we suppose that we lived on a planet with a total cloud-cover that kept out all information from the exterior universe. It is only in very recent times, of course, that the information coming in from the universe has been captured and coded into the form of a complex image of what the universe is like outside the earth; but even in primitive times, man's perception of the heavenly bodies has always profoundly affected his image of earth and of himself. It is the information generated within the planet, however, and particularly that generated by man himself, which forms by far the larger part of the information system. We can think of the stock of knowledge, or as Teilhard de Chardin called it, the "noosphere," and consider this as an open system, losing knowledge through aging and death and gaining it through birth and education and the ordinary experience of life.

From the human point of view, knowledge or information is by far the most important of the three systems. Matter only acquires significance and only enters the sociosphere or the econosphere insofar as it becomes an object of human knowledge. We can think of capital, indeed, as frozen knowledge or knowledge imposed on the material world in the form of improbable arrangements. A machine, for instance, originated in the mind of man, and both its construction and its use involve information processes imposed on the material world by man himself. The cumulation of knowledge, that is, the excess of its production over its consumption, is the key to human development of all kinds, especially to economic development. We can see this pre-eminence of knowledge very clearly in the experiences of countries where the material capital has been destroyed by a war, as in Japan and Germany. The knowledge of the people was not destroyed, and it did not take long, therefore, certainly not more than ten years, for most of the material capital to be reestablished again. In a country such as Indonesia, however, where the knowledge did not exist, the material capital did not come into being either. By "knowledge" here I mean, of course, the whole cognitive structure, which includes valuations and motivations as well as images of the factual world.

The concept of entropy, used in a somewhat loose sense, can be applied to all three of these open systems. In the case of material systems, we can distinguish between entropic processes, which take concentrated materials and diffuse them through the oceans or over the earth's surface or into the atmosphere, and anti-entropic processes, which take diffuse materials and concentrate them. Material entropy can be taken as a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of elements and, more uncertainly, compounds and other structures on the earth's surface. There is, fortunately, no law of increasing material entropy, as there is in the corresponding case of energy, as it is quite possible to concentrate diffused materials if energy inputs are allowed. Thus the processes for fixation of nitrogen from the air, processes for the extraction of magnesium or other elements from the sea, and processes for the desalinization of sea water are anti-entropic ill the material sense, though the reduction of material entropy has to be paid for by inputs of energy and also inputs of information, or at least a stock of information in the system. In regard to matter, therefore, a closed system is conceivable, that is, a system in which there is neither increase nor decrease in material entropy. In such a system all outputs from consumption would constantly be recycled to become inputs for production, as for instance, nitrogen in the nitrogen cycle of the natural ecosystem.

In regard to the energy system there is, unfortunately, no escape from the grim Second Law of Thermodynamics; and if there were no energy inputs into the earth, any evolutionary or developmental process would be impossible. The large energy inputs which we have obtained from fossil fuels are strictly temporary. Even the most optimistic predictions would expect the easily available supply of fossil fuels to be exhausted in a mere matter of centuries at present rates of use. If the rest of the world were to rise to American standards of power consumption, and still more if world population continues to increase, the exhaustion of fossil fuels would be even more rapid. The development of nuclear energy has improved this picture, but has not fundamentally altered it, at least in present technologies, for fissionable material is still relatively scarce. If we should achieve the economic use of energy through fusion, of course, a much larger source of energy materials would be available, which would expand the time horizons of supplementary energy input into an open social system by perhaps tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Failing this, however, the time is not very far distant, historically speaking, when man will once more have to retreat to his current energy input from tile sun, even though this could be used much more effectively than in the past with increased knowledge. Up to now, certainly, we have not got very far with the technology of using current solar energy, but the possibility of substantial improvements in the future is certainly high. It may be, indeed, that the biological revolution which is just beginning will produce a solution to this problem, as we develop artificial organisms which are capable of much more efficient transformation of solar energy into easily available forms than any that we now have. As Richard Meier has suggested, we may run our machines in the future with methane-producing algae. 2

The question of whether there is anything corresponding to entropy in the information system is a puzzling one, though of great interest. There are certainly many examples of social systems and cultures which have lost knowledge, especially in transition from one generation to the next, and in which the culture has therefore degenerated. One only has to look at the folk culture of Appalachian migrants to American cities to see a culture which started out as a fairly rich European folk culture in Elizabethan times and which seems to have lost both skills, adaptability, folk tales, songs, and almost everything that goes up to make richness and complexity in a culture, in the course of about ten generations. The American Indians on reservations provide another example of such degradation of the information and knowledge system. On the other hand, over a great part of human history, the growth of knowledge in the earth as a whole seems to have been almost continuous, even though there have been times of relatively slow growth and times of rapid growth. As it is knowledge of certain kinds that produces the growth of knowledge in general, we have here a very subtle and complicated system, and it is hard to put one's finger on the particular elements in a culture which make knowledge grow more or less rapidly, or even which make it decline. One of the great puzzles in this connection, for instance, is why the take-off into science, which represents an "acceleration," or an increase in the rate of growth of knowledge in European society in the sixteenth century, did not take place in China, which at that time (about 1600) was unquestionably ahead of Europe, and one would think even more ready for the breakthrough. This is perhaps the most crucial question in the theory of social development, yet we must confess that it is very little understood. Perhaps the most significant factor in this connection is the existence of "slack" in the culture, which permits a divergence from established patterns and activity which is not merely devoted to reproducing the existing society but is devoted to changing it. China was perhaps too well-organized and had too little slack in its society to produce the kind of acceleration which we find in the somewhat poorer and less well-organized but more diverse societies of Europe.

The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. Tile closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and thc success of the economy is measured by the amount of tile throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to distinguish that part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way, although it Would be an interesting and extremely important exercise, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.

By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.

There are actually some very tricky and unsolved problems involved in the questions as to whether human welfare or well-being is to be regarded as a stock or a flow. Something of both these elements seems actually to be involved in it, and as far as I know there have been practically no studies directed towards identifying these two dimensions of human satisfaction. Is it, for instance, eating that is a good thing, or is it being well fed? Does economic welfare involve having nice clothes, fine houses, good equipment, and so on, or is it to be measured by the depreciation and the wearing out of these things? I am inclined myself to regard the stock concept as most fundamental, that is, to think of being well fed as more important than eating, and to think even of so-called services as essentially involving the restoration of a depleting psychic capital. Thus I have argued that we go to a concert in order to restore a psychic condition which might be called "just having gone to a concert," which, once established, tends to depreciate. When it depreciates beyond a certain point, we go to another concert in order to restore it. If it depreciates rapidly, we go to a lot of concerts; if it depreciates slowly, we go to few. On this view, similarly, we eat primarily to restore bodily homeostasis, that is, to maintain a condition of being well fed, and so on. On this view, there is nothing desirable in consumption at all. The less consumption we can maintain a given state with, the better off we are. If we had clothes that did not wear out, houses that did not depreciate, and even if we could maintain our bodily condition without eating, we would clearly be much better off.

It is this last consideration, perhaps, which makes one pause. Would we, for instance, really want an operation that at would enable us to restore all our bodily tissues by intravenous feeding while we slept? Is there not, that is to say, a certain virtue in throughput itself, in activity itself, in production and consumption itself, in raising food and in eating it? It would certainly be rash to exclude this possibility. Further interesting problems are raised by the demand for variety. We certainly do not want a constant state to be maintained; we want fluctuations in the state. Otherwise there would be no demand for variety in food, for variety in scene, as in travel, for variety in social contact, and so on. The demand for variety can, of course, be costly, and sometimes it seems to be too costly to be tolerated or at least legitimated, as in tile case of marital partners, where the maintenance of a homeostatic state in the family is usually regarded as much more desirable than the variety and excessive throughput of the libertine. There are problems here which the economics profession has neglected with astonishing singlemindedness. My own attempts to call attention to some of them, for instance, in two articles, 3 as far as I call judge, produced no response whatever; and economists continue to think and act as if production, consumption, throughput, and the GNP were the sufficient and adequate measure of economic success.

It may be said, of course, why worry about all this when the spaceman economy is still a good way off (at least beyond the lifetimes of any now living), so let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry about the spaceship earth. It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously "irrational." Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? "Apres nous, le deluge" has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that thc most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked tip with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and "nerve" of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart. 4

Even if we concede that posterity is relevant to our present problems, we still face the question of time-discounting and the closely related question of uncertainty-discounting. It is a well-known phenomenon that individuals discount the future, even in their own lives. The very existence of a positive rate of interest may be taken as at least strong supporting evidence of this hypothesis. If we discount our own future, it is certainly not unreasonable to discount posterity's future even more, even if we do give posterity a vote. If we discount this at 5 per cent per annum, posterity's vote or dollar halves every fourteen years as we look into the future, and after even a mere hundred years it is pretty small -- only about 1 1/2 cents on the dollar. If we add another 5 per cent for uncertainty, even the vote of our grandchildren reduces almost to insignificance. We can argue, of course, that the ethical thing to do is not to discount thc future at all, that time-discounting is mainly the result of myopia and perspective, and hence is an illusion which the moral man should not tolerate. It is a very popular illusion, however, and one that must certainly be taken into consideration in the formulation of policies. It explains, perhaps, why conservationist policies almost have to be sold under some other excuse which seems more urgent, and why, indeed, necessities which are visualized as urgent, such as defense, always seem to hold priority over those which involve thc future.

All these considerations add some credence to the point of view which says that we should not worry about the spaceman economy at all, and that we should just go on increasing the GNP and indeed the gross world product, or GWP, in the expectation that the problems of the future can be left to the future, that when scarcities arise, whether this is of raw materials or of pollutable reservoirs, the needs of the then present will determine the solutions of the then present, and there is no use giving ourselves ulcers by worrying about problems that we really do not have to solve. There is even high ethical authority for this point of view in the New Testament, which advocates that we should take no thought for tomorrow and let the dead bury their dead. There has always been something rather refreshing in the view that we should live like the birds, and perhaps posterity is for the birds in more senses than one; so perhaps we should all call it a day and go out and pollute something cheerfully. As an old taker of thought for the morrow, however, I cannot quite accept this solution; and I would argue, furthermore, that tomorrow is not only very close, but in many respects it is already here. The shadow of the future spaceship, indeed, is already falling over our spendthrift merriment. Oddly enough, it seems to be in pollution rather than in exhaustion that the problem is first becoming salient. Los Angeles has run out of air, Lake Erie has become a cesspool, the oceans are getting full of lead and DDT, and the atmosphere may become man's major problem in another generation, at the rate at which we are filling

it up with gunk. It is, of course, true that at least on it microscale, things have been worse at times in the past. The cities of today, with all their foul air and polluted waterways, are probably not as bad as the filthy cities of the petrochemical age. Nevertheless, that 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; and one certainly cannot view with equanimity the present rate of pollution of any of the natural reservoirs, whether the atmosphere, the lakes, or even the oceans.

I would argue strongly also that our obsession with production and consumption to the exclusion of the "state" aspects of human welfare distorts the process of technological change in a most undesirable way. We are all familiar, of course, with the wastes involved in planned obsolescence, in competitive advertising, and in poor quality of consumer goods. These problems may not be so important as tile "view with alarm," school indicates, and indeed the evidence at many points is conflicting. New materials especially seem to edge towards the side of improved durability, such as, for instance, neolite soles for footwear, nylon socks, wash and wear shirts, and so on. The case of household equipment and automobiles is a little less clear. Housing and building construction generally almost certainly has declined in durability since the Middle Ages, but this decline also reflects a change in tastes towards flexibility and fashion and a need for novelty, so that it is not easy to assess. What is clear is that no serious attempt has been made to assess the impact over the whole of economic life of changes in durability, that is, in the ratio of capital ill the widest possible sense to income. I suspect that we have underestimated, even in our spendthrift society, the gains from increased durability, and that this might very well be one of the places where thc price system needs correction through government-sponsored research and development. Thc problems which thc spaceship earth is going to present, therefore, are not all in the future by any means, and a strong case can be made for paying much more attention to them in the present than we now do.

It may be complained that the considerations I have been putting forth relate only to the very long run, and they do not much concern our immediate problems. There may be some justice in this criticism, and my main excuse is that other writers have dealt adequately with the more immediate problems of deterioration in the quality of the environment. It is true, for instance, that many of the immediate problems of pollution of thc atmosphere or of bodies of water arise because of the failure of the price system, and many of them could be solved by corrective taxation. If people had to pay the losses due to the nuisances which they create, a good deal more resources would go into the prevention of nuisances. These arguments involving external economies and diseconomics arc familiar to economists, and there is no need to recapitulate them. The law of torts is quite inadequate to provide for the correction of the price system which is required, simply because where damages are widespread and their incidence on any particular person is small, the ordinary remedies of the civil law are quite inadequate and inappropriate. There needs, therefore, to be special legislation to cover those cases, and though such legislation seems hard to get in practice, mainly because of the widespread and small personal incidence of the injuries, the technical problems involved are not insuperable. If we were to adopt in principle a law for tax penalties for social damages, with an apparatus for making assessments under it, a very large proportion of current pollution and deterioration of the environment would be prevented. There are tricky problems of equity involved, particularly where old established nuisances create a kind of "right by purchase" to perpetuate themselves, but these are problems again which a few rather arbitrary decisions can bring to some kind of solution.

The problems which I have been raising in this paper are of larger scale and perhaps much harder to solve than the more practical and immediate problems of the above paragraph. Our success in dealing with the larger problems, however, is not unrelated to the development of skill in the solution of the more immediate and perhaps less difficult problems. One can hope, therefore, that as a succession of mounting crises, especially in pollution, arouse public opinion and mobilize support for the solution of the immediate problems, a learning process will be set in motion which will eventually lead to an appreciation of and perhaps solutions for the larger ones. My neglect of the immediate problems, therefore, is in no way intended to deny their importance, for unless we at least make a beginning on a process for solving the immediate problems we will not have much chance of solving the larger ones. On the other hand, it may also be true that a long-run vision, as it were, of the deep crisis which faces mankind may predispose people to taking more interest in the immediate problems and to devote more effort for their solution. This may sound like a rather modest optimism, but perhaps a modest optimism is better than no optimism at all.

1 Ludwig von Berlalanffy, Problems of Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1952).

2 Richard L. Meier, Science and Economic Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956).

3 K. E. Boulding, "The Consumption Concept in Economic Theory," American Economic Review, 35:2 (May 1945), pp. 1-14; and "Income or Welfare?," Review o/Economic Studies, 17 (1949-50), pp. 77-86.

4 Fred L. Polak, The Image o/ the Future. Vols. I and II, translated by Elise Boulding (New York: Sythoff, Leyden and Oceana, 1961 ).