What Happened to Boulding's Evolutionary Economics?

摘要

In the view of the author and others, Kenneth E. Boulding was one of the greatest social scientists of the twentieth century. His output was prodigious: over 30 books and 150 papers. He died in 1993, and Robert Solo, Kurt Dopfer, L. Randall Wray, and E. Ray Canterbery reviewed his work in the December 1994 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. The editor noted, "The late Kenneth Boulding was a controversial economist even among the heterodox." However, Solo indicated Boulding "to be the most creative social scientist of our time." Since then, Boulding's influence apparently has receded from the literature. An electronic search of the literature seeking post-1994 comments on or evaluations of Boulding's views found two articles, Khalil 1996 and Joseph 2003. Boulding's major work presenting his evolutionary perspective was Ecodynamics (1978). The more specific application of his theory to economics was contained in Evolutionary Economics, published in 1981. He followed with two other books, The World as a Total System (1985) and Three Faces of Power (1989), which presented other aspects of his general system theory. In his last book, Towards a New Economics (1992), he reviewed his intellectual development and identified his total publications of articles, books, book reviews, monographs, and pamphlets through 1988 at 1,019. The book contained a sample of his articles, written in the 1980s, on economics, "the grants economy," international relations, and ecology.