Kenneth Boulding on Art

"part of a much larger movement of dissent, that includes London School Institutionalists, Oxford Antimarginalists and the German Historical School (especially its second generation."

"If there is no decrease in the net worth of either party, the transaction is exchange; if there is, it contains some grant element and is an explicit or implicit grant."

"Whole Terrain link to Boulding's articles published in Whole Terrain"

"Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it."

"It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to, “Economics is what economists do,” and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers."

"One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis , generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation , associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes."

"It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order – not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies."