Boulding was born on 18 January 1910 in Liverpool, England, and educated at Oxford and the University of Chicago. He has lived in the United States since 1937, teaching at Colgate, Fisk, Iowa State and McGill Universities, the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado. He was president of several learned societies including the American Economic Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The steadfast purpose that Boulding pursued in his work has been integration of knowledge. Instead of following the endlessly ramifying paths of specialized research in his chosen discipline, he sought to reach out from his ‘home base’ in economics to knowledge generated in other fields and, above all, to establish a leverage for deriving common vocabularies, conceptual frameworks, and methods.

This drive toward integration marks all of Boulding’s contributions to economics. A typical example is the use of demographic models to describe macroeconomic aggregates. The sizes of biological populations are, of course, determined by birth rates and death rates. But these depend significantly on the age structure of the populations. Boulding conceives the aggregates of physical capital as a population of items, each characterized by an age. Production is analogous to births, consumption to deaths. Surely, the rates depend on the age structure of the ‘population’, as was vividly demonstrated in the post-war boom in the US automobile industry, when the population of automobiles was old (and hence had a high ‘death rate’) and by the eventual slump, which could have been predicted as a consequence of the same population becoming predominantly ‘young’. The emphasis on ‘structure’ of aggregates marks also Boulding’s treatment of income, the levels of prices and wages, price flexibility, etc.

To the extent that Boulding can be said to subscribe to any economic school of thought, he can be regarded as a Keynesian. His contribution in this direction has been in the macroeconomic theory of profits, which relates profits both to net investment and to distributions out of profits, what Keynes called the ‘widow’s cruse theory’ (referring to the biblical legend of the cruse that never ran dry). While acknowledging an ‘enormous debt to Keynes’s brilliance of insight and imaginative sweep’, Boulding points to a number of weaknesses in Keynesian macroeconomics, in particular failure to distinguish between exchanges, on the one hand, and the processes of production and consumption, on the other. In A Reconstruction of Economics Boulding developed separate theories of the two processes. In the same book he offered what he himself regards as, perhaps, the most original and controversial attempt to correct a weakness of Keynesian theory. The central idea is based on a generalization from the context of microeconomics to macroeconomics of the gross growth in the value of net worth.

Grant economics, that is, the theory of one-way transfers (in contrast to exchanges) is a field that Boulding helped to found. Subsidies, philanthropy and welfare clearly fall within the scope of this field. But it may well be extended to taxation or generally to any transactions involving transfers difficult to define as exchanges, the prime concern of mainstream economics.

In ‘evolutionary economics’, as in ‘demography of aggregates’, Boulding again draws upon the conceptual repertoire of biological science. Economics is seen as an evolving ecosystem, following the general principles of mutation and selection. Mutation is interpreted as new ideas, new knowledge, modified, of course, by monopoly, government policy, etc. ‘Know how’. plays the role of the fundamental genetic factor, analogous to the seat of biological heredity, directing the development of the units of the ecosystem (analogues of organisms) whose interactions, in turn, shape the evolution of the system.

Recognition of Boulding’s stature in the academic world has been lavish. Besides professorships in six universities and presidencies of several learned societies, he has held visiting research and teaching positions in about twenty institutions all over the world. He has been the recipient of at least ten honorary degrees and as many medals, awards, and prizes.

In contrast, Boulding’s profession (as an ‘establishment’) has exhibited a marked coolness toward his work. In pursuing his commitment, Boulding abandoned the safety of established theoretical frameworks and conceptual schemes of his discipline. In particular, his major work, A Reconstruction of Economics (1950), which was, perhaps, meant to introduce new paradigms in the development of economic theory, met with a mixed response. There was no lack of appreciation of Boulding’s originality and felicitous insights, the outstanding traits of his writings. The soundness of his specific contributions, however, was at times questioned. William Vickrey, in his review of A Reconstruction of Economics wrote:

The most interesting and suggestive, but perhaps precarious section is the last, in which Boulding carries the analysis of macroeconomic identities to new and perhaps extravagant lengths. The new superstructure, though it leads to very interesting and even startling conclusions, depends, in many crucial spots, on precisely the kind of structural stability of relationship, and absence of unanalyzed side effects that Boulding has been at pains to warn us of in the preceding section. (American Economic Review 1951, pp. 671–6)

Not only the content but also the style of Boulding’s rich output (about forty books and a thousand articles) must have contributed to widening the gulf between him and the economic ‘establishment’. Integration is accomplished in consequence of seeing unity in diversity. Accordingly, analogy plays a prominent role in Boulding’s thought, the sort of analogy that serves as the mortar of a general theory of systems, where structural similarities connecting situations of widely differing content are at the focus of attention. (Boulding was a co-founder of the Society for General Systems Research.)

Analogies occupy positions on a spectrum of rigour. At one end are mathematical isomorphisms, providing the most solid basis for unified theories of widely different phenomena. At the other end are the metaphors of poetry, triggering at times exhilarating insights but not guaranteeing any degree of objective validity or theoretical leverage. Boulding travels freely over that spectrum. In consequence, his style is wholly devoid of the dullness traditionally expected in works with a claim to scientific rigour or scholarly erudition. It seems that Boulding’s attraction to what is interesting and paradoxical and his undisguised delight in iconoclasm, as well as the paucity of his references to the work of other economists (‘It is easier to think it up than look it up’), contributed to the estrangement between him and his profession.

Boulding has no compunction against stating a profound principle as a quip, for example, ‘Everything that exists is possible’ (primacy of empirical evidence over doctrinaire conclusions), ‘Things are the way they are, because they got that way’ (commitment to the evolutionary point of view). There are gems to be found in Boulding’s delightful jingles: ‘That is reckoned wisdom which/Describes the scratch but not the itch’ (a barb aimed at behaviourist dogma).

Boundaries between devotion to truth and devotion to values have no more meaning for Boulding than those between instruction and entertainment. He recognizes the stimulus that led many scientists to insist on a hermetic separation between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. For instance, the superiority of ‘price equilibrium’ over a ‘just price’ as a fertile theoretical construct of economics is not disputed. But this emancipation from externally imposed morality has freed science in Boulding’s estimation to develop its own system of values, apparent to anyone who, like Boulding, sees science not as an agglomeration of facts or techniques, not even as a system of theories but as an ongoing human enterprise, a passionate search for wisdom. Like Socrates, Boulding identifies wisdom with virtue. It is, perhaps, this insistence on the fundamental morality of science and of economics in particular that was the most important factor creating a distance between Boulding and the economic establishment.

Brought up as a Methodist and eventually becoming a Quaker, Boulding has remained a deeply religious person. For him Christianity is inseparable from pacifism. Rejection of war as an institution and of violence in all its manifestations is a cardinal principle in his political orientation. He has provided some outstanding leadership in the American peace movement, particularly during the turbulent years of the Vietnam war. He was a co-founder and director of the Center for Research in Conflict Resolution at the University of Michigan. This absorbing involvement in peace issues is reflected in several of his works, for example The Economics of Peace (1945), Conflict and Defense (1962), Disarmament and the Economy (1963).

In sum, Boulding is an economist who under pressure of intellectual curiosity and a devotion to freedom, justice, and progress (for which he has offered quite respectable operational definitions) has turned into a philosopher, be it noted, a scientifically literate one. The full flavour of his creative thought can be savoured in The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964), Beyond Economics (1968), and The Image (1956). The latter book, dictated in eleven days, was the ‘product’ of Boulding’s sojourn at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences in Palo Alto, California. There he met many of his contemporaries, who, he says, had a profound influence on his thinking.

Selected Works

  • 1941. Economic analysis. New York: Harper. Rev. edn, Harper, 1948; 3rd edn, New York: Harper, 1955; 4th edn, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

  • 1945. The economics of peace. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; reissued, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.

  • 1950. A reconstruction of economics. New York: Wiley; reissued, Science Editions, 1962.

  • 1953. The organizational revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organizations. New York: Harper, 1953; reissued, New York: Greenwood Press, 1984.

  • 1956. The image; knowledge in life and society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  • 1958a. The skills of the economist. New York, Toronto: Clarke, Irwin.

  • 1958b. Principles of economic policy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

  • 1962. Conflict and defense: A general theory. New York: Harper.

  • 1963. (With E. Benoit, ed.) Disarmament and the economy. New York: Harper & Row; reissued, New York: Greenwood Press, 1978.

  • 1964. The meaning of the twentieth century: The great transition. New York: Harper & Row.

  • 1968. Beyond economics: Essays on society, religion, and ethics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

  • 1970. Economics as a science. New York: McGraw-Hill.

  • 1973. The economy of love and fear: A preface to grants economics. Belmont, California: Wadsworth.

  • 1978. (With T.F. Wilson, eds.) Redistribution through the financial system: The grants economics of money and credit. New York: Praeger.

  • 1981. Evolutionary economics. London: Sage Publications.

  • 1985. Human betterment. London: Sage Publications.