Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure. If there is a failure of expectations, that is, if the messages that we receive are not the same as those we expected, we can make three possible inferences.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.

The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.

Nations are divided into "good"and "bad"-the enemy is all bad, one's own nation is of spotless virtue. Wars are either acts of God or acts of the other nations, which always catch us completely by surprise. To a student of international systems the national image even of respectable, intellectual, and powerful people seems naive and untrue. The patriotism of the sophisticated cannot be a simple faith. There is, however, in the course of human history a powerful and probably irreversible movement toward sophistication. We can wise up, but we cannot wise down, except at enormous cost in the breakdown of civilizations, and not even a major breakdown results in much loss of knowledge.

[Boulding grasps the significance of sociobiology's emphasis on biogenetics] that there are biogenetic factors in learning capacity and potential can hardly be denied... [yet] biogenetically imposed limits to human learning... seem to be much more remote... than are the limitations imposed by the biogenetic structure."

Canada has no cultural unity no linguistic unity no religious unity no economic unity no geographic unity. All it has is unity.

[The information available within a system constitutes what Boulding (1978) calls the noosphere. It is constituted by the collection of plans, of representations, of procedures, of ideas for the construction of objects or of instructions to realize certain interaction patterns, including] the totality of the cognitive content, including values, of all human nervous systems, plus the prostatic devices by which the system is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones, post offices, and so on.

:(viii) Because of the vital importance for the individual man of symbolic images and behavior based on them it is not easy to separate clearly the level of the individual human organism from the next level, that of social organizations...

What might be called, perhaps somewhat grandiloquently, the Epistemological Question has received rather scant attention at the hands of economists. There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.

If we saw tomorrow’s newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.

[The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?

:(iii) The next level is that of the control mechanism or cybernetic system, which might be nicknamed the level of the thermostat...

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message

[You know you are in a part of the economy dealing with grants instead of exchange when] A gives B something and B does not give A anything in the way of an economic good.