Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

We should raise fierce flames of innovations in the vanguard sectors, basic industrial sectors, and all other sectors of the national economy.

Science has gone a long way toward helping man to free himself from the burden of hard labor; yet, science itself is not a liberator. It creates means, not goals. It is up to men to utilize those means to achieve reasonable goals.

There are many machines throughout history that were built to do something better than a human can.

Mass prosperity came with the mass innovation that sprung up in 1815 in Britain, soon after in America, and later in Germany and France: It brought sustained growth to these nations - also to nations with entrepreneurs willing and able to copy the innovations.

When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.

The only way you get economic progress, real standards of living moving higher, is to have the savings of the society continuously invested in the cutting-edge technologies. And those technologies which are obsolescent get dropped out.

If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.

Well into the 20th century, scholars viewed economic advances as resulting from commercial innovations enabled by the discoveries of scientists - discoveries that come from outside the economy and out of the blue.

How did the economy produce all these amazing things that we have around us - computers and cell phones and so on? There were a bunch of ideas, and the good ones grew and prospered. And the bad ones were pretty ruthlessly weeded out.

The United States as we know it today is largely the result of mechanical inventions, and in particular of agricultural machinery and the railroad.

Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign.

A completely industrialized society is of no consequence to me.

The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.

...industrialisation took centuries, rather than decades

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

I know the Rich will oppose this; but the Richest Men are not always most beneficial to the Commonwealth, Men of Projecting Brains do most good to their Neighbours, for tho' they often hurt themselves by their Projects, yet others reap the benefit of them, and so the Publick is not hurt but helped by them, and I presume none will deny but that this Town hath been more advantaged by some Men now in it of mean Estates, then ever they were by the Richest Men in it

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.

Innovation really is the life blood of our American economy... looking back at the stories of Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers, you look at emergence to technology innovation and what it has done for our economy. We need to continue that.

Used to the conditions of a capitalistic environment, the average American takes it for granted that every year business makes something new and better accessible to him. Looking backward upon the years of his own life, he realizes that many implements that were totally unknown in the days of his youth and many others which at that time could be enjoyed only by a small minority are now standard equipment of almost every household.

Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago, and the twentieth would be no further advanced than the eighteenth century.

So, we've gone from covered wagons to going to the moon in just under 100 years. For all the centuries and thousands of years before us, people walked or rode horses, cows, camels or whatever. This so-called modern era, from the late 19th century through now, has been the period of the most amazing development, discovery, innovation and acceleration of change that humans have ever experienced. And it hasn't slowed down yet.

Productivity growth is the only possible way to achieve prosperity.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there's growth, where there's a way in which everybody can be better off over time.

China has consistently surprised us. When I returned from the United States many years ago, it was unimaginable that we would end up where we are now. What China has achieved defies all logic. I credit this to the hard work and enterprising spirit of the Chinese people.