by Saul Silverman, November 1998

What Jay Hanson and others might like to look at is the writings of Kenneth Boulding, certainly a leading professional economist of his day (1930s through 1970s, I think), particularly his little book on mathematical economics and its underlying preconceptions entitled A RECONSTRUCTION OF ECONOMICS (originally published in 1950, and reprinted in 1962 in a paperbound edition by Wiley) in which Boulding anchors technical economics in an explicitly ecological framework.

The first chapter lays the foundations ("An Ecological Introduction", pp. 3 ff.) in a discussion of the physical reality that economics has to deal with as an ecosystem in which "populations act and react upon each other, and the equilibrium size of any given population is a function of the sizes of all others." He goes on, wherever appropriate, throughout the book to link economics and ecology. Very specifically, in his chapter on "The Equilibrium of Production and Consumption" (pp. 155 ff.) Boulding makes the linkage (by analogy) between flows and cycles in natural ecologies and the flow of assets in economic systems (pp.166-167). In his final chapter, "A Concluding Note" (pp. 303-308) Boulding gives his views as to the future orientation of economics and its methods. He devotes the greater part of this chapter to the application of cybernetic thinking to economics; though he focuses on the application of cybernetics to dealing with "the wide fluctuations of output and unemployment" and the problem of reducing these to "tolerable dimensions", the point is worth thinking about and probably has more wider applicability to the range of today's problems.

The book itself is an epitome of Boulding's revisionist economic thinking and analysis, and the orientation of his policy recommendations. It presents both an overview of the underpinnings of economics (as he sees it) and an assessment of what can be useful in the technical apparatus of modern economic analysis (up to that time). In the latter field, Boulding, through the various editions of his massive textbook, ECONOMIC ANALYSIS (from the 1940's on) probably had an influence on the training and orientation of professional economists at least as significant as Samuelson's.

Boulding's RECONSTRUCTION IN ECONOMICS deserves to be read (or worked through) in full. It leads to an appreciation of Boulding's later writings as an advocate of ecological and social innovation as a means of approaching the resolution (so far as they can be resolved) of the problems of living in, and caring for, this world. As such, it is a useful contribution that remains broadly relevant today.

www.wairaka.net/ubinz/IR/items/199811KennethBoulding.html