Kenneth E. Boulding
The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey; Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.Collection: Mother
... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.Collection: Past
The illusion that consumption - and its correlative, income - is desirable probably stems from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself.Collection: Knights
Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.Collection: Favors
As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.Collection: Memories
DNA has been aptly described as the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.Collection: Science
Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.Collection: Facts
With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.Collection: Laissez Faire
[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.Collection: Men
[Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively.Collection: Conflict
[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.Collection: Real
The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.Collection: Philosophy
[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.'Collection: Mean
The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.Collection: Children
Production functions involving only land, labor and capital... never work and never explain economic development.Collection: Land
The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Ideas
Without the heroic, man has no meaning; without the economic, he has no sense. Economic man is most likely to be economic woman - a good wife, pulling the coat tails of her heroic husband, checking his extravagances of speech and action with words of caution and good sense. But without the heroic coat tails to pull, life for both of them would be dull and savorless indeed.Collection: Husband
One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.Collection: Cheerful
[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.Collection: War
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.Collection: Loss
[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together.Collection: Together
Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.Collection: Simple
I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.Collection: Problem