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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
Author 1 book10 followers

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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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An Introduction to Boulding
The Day the Liberals Won
Mr. Boulding and the Americans
Cosmogenesis
Where the Buffalo Roam
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
Boulding’s Place in Economic History
Postscript

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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.

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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

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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

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

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“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.

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