Kenneth Boulding – Introduction
April 4, 2020 § 4 Comments
This is an introduction to a new series of posts that I plan to develop over the next few weeks as part of my book Quakers and Capitalism, for which I’ve returned to my research.
The book is a history of Quaker contributions to capitalist culture and, in particular, to the industrial revolution and industrial capitalism, and a history of Quaker fortunes, with commentary. The work so far covers the period from the 1650s through the Second World War. (Note that a shorter version appears as a chapter in Quakers, Politics, and Economics, Volume 5 of Friends Association for Higher Education’s series Quakers and the Disciplines, published in 2018, David R. Ross, editor.)
I envision the rest of the book including biographies of key Quaker contributors to the political economics of the twentieth century: Herbert Hoover, Kenneth Boulding, John Powelson, A. J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, and George Lakey; and the emergence of Quaker organizations focused on political economics: the American Friends Service Committee, Right Sharing of World Resources, and the Quaker Institute for the Future. (I’m not sure whether I’ll discuss Friends Committee on National Legislation or the Quaker United Nations Office, as I’m not yet sure how much either of these organizations got into political economics.)
Kenneth E. Boulding
So right now I’m reading books by and about Kenneth Boulding (1910–1993). Many Friends know him best as a poet, the author of a book of sonnets. But he was an important figure in the field of economics. He coined the phrase “spaceship earth,” joining the fields of ecology and economics for the first time with a focus on the values inherent in an economic system, on assets and capital (the earth) rather than on income and flow (profit), and on the limits to growth inherent in the earth’s finite stock of resources.
He might have been at least as important, however, as a kind of whole-field theorist in the social sciences more broadly. He was a pioneer of interdisciplinary study in the academy and a major contributor to systems theory. He and a handful of mates created the field of peace research. But my main focus will be on his economic thought.
More to come.
Through the Flaming Sword 
I was delighted to see this blog, Steven (and thank you Elaine Emmi for bringing it to my attention). I’d like to offer one point of clarification: my father did not coin the phrase “spaceship earth,” or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the that phrase emerged spontaneously with a number of people apparently using it more of less independently (Adlai Stevenson, Buckminster Fuller, Barbara Ward to name a few others). The first use of the term in writing seems to have been Lynton K. Caldwell (Elaine’s father!).
Kenneth’s classic pamphlet “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth was published in 1966. His book “The Reconstruction of Economics”, published in 1950, can reasonably be pinpointed as laying the foundations for the field of ecological economics even though it didn’t emerge as a well-defined field of study until the 1960s.
Anyone who might be interested in learning more about the Quaker foundations of Kenneth and Elise Boulding’s work can download the chapter I co-authored with my father’s biographer that came out in the FAHE volume Steven mentioned: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327579196_Kenneth_and_Elise_Boulding_Friends_for_Peace_and_Betterment
You’ve left out Bill Vickrey, a member of Scarsdale Meeting, Steve.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1996/vickrey/biographical/
Thanks, Carol. I didn’t know about Bill Vickrey.
It’s interesting to learn about the political economic and ecological side of Kenneth Boulding. I look forward to more!