The concept of need is often looked upon rather unfavorably by economists, in contrast with the concept of demand. Both, however, have their own stre… - Kenneth E. Boulding

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The concept of need is often looked upon rather unfavorably by economists, in contrast with the concept of demand. Both, however, have their own strengths and weaknesses. The need concept is criticized as being too mechanical, as denying the autonomy and individuality of the human person, and as implying that the human being is a machine which "needs" fuel in the shape of food, engine dope in the shape of medicine, and spare parts provided by the surgeon.

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About Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Ewart Boulding (18 January 1910 – 18 March 1993) was an economist, educator, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to .

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Native Name: Kenneth Ewart Boulding
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The 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

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It is an arithmetic, moreover, which cannot be denied even though we nearly all try to deny it. The arithmetic is simply this: Any positive rate of growth whatever eventually carries a human population to an unacceptable magnitude, no matter how small the rate of growth may be unless the rate of population growth can be reduced to zero before the population reaches an unacceptable magnitude. There is a famous theorem in economics, one which I call the dismal theorem, which states that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the population will grow until it is sufficiently miserable and starving to check its growth. There is a second, even worse theorem which I call the utterly dismal theorem. It says that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery than before and hence to increase the total sum of human misery.

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