KENNETH E. BOULDING

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

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 greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market... the higher the black market price.

The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

The process of consumption is the final act in the economic drama.

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

Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.

Justification, in terms of the broadening of freedom, for any particular form of institution of property must be argued in terms of whether the losses caused by the restrictions imposed are greater or less than the gains derived from the elimination of costly conflict.

Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions, and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other.

Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?

Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

Where there is hypocrisy, there is hope.

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.

The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.

[on the theory of the firm] It is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a 'firm' whose product is 'utility.'

[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.

One advantage of exhibiting a hierarchy of systems in this way is that it gives us some idea of the present gaps in both theoretical and empirical knowledge. Adequate theoretical models extend up to about the fourth level, and not much beyond. Empirical knowledge is deficient at practically all levels.

The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.

With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.

Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power - all these things clearly represent economic progress.

It is much more accurate to identify the factors of production as know-how (that is genetic information structure), energy, and materials, for, as we have seen, all processes of production involve the direction of energy by some know-how structure toward the selection, transportation, and transformation of materials into the product

The concept of a value-free science is absurd.