Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

Economics is a social science, not a physical science.

As a scholarly discipline, economics has always suffered from physics envy.

The study of economics has been again and again led astray by the vain idea that economics must proceed according to the pattern of other sciences.

'Freakonomics' began with a 'N.Y. Times Magazine' profile I wrote about Steve Levitt. I was working on a book about 'the psychology of money,' and since Levitt's an economist, my editor thought I'd be the guy to write about him. Fact is that Levitt has almost no interest in either psychology or money.

I was trained as an economic theorist; my job at MIT was as an economic theorist. At some level that's still part of my identity.

Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.

So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

Economists are people who wonder if what works in reality can also work in theory.

A lot of my colleagues have been people with broad interests in economics, not just narrowly focused interests.

I am one of the most successful economists, according to what markets tell us, though most of my professional colleagues, who are much keener to accept market outcomes than I am, would dismiss me as a crank or - the worst of all abuses among economists - a 'sociologist.'

Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

I am saying that the economic approach provides a valuable unified framework for understanding all human behaviour

I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.

As the science of economics...exploded the fallacies of every brand of utopianism, it was outlawed and stigmatized as unscientific.

Any man who is only an economist is unlikely to be a good one.

Macroeconomics, even with all of our computers and with all of our information - is not an exact science and is incapable of being an exact science.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

Economics has been called the dismal science. Once you get to understand it, you may not find it so dismal, but you don't find it much of a science either.

I don't care very much for the People Magazine approach to applied economics.

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.

Economics is not a morality play.

All economists should be locked up until they admit that they don't know what they're talking about.