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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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65. Kenneth E. Boulding

Since 1967 Professor Kenneth E. Boulding has been professor of economics and director of the program of research on general social and economic dynamics at the Institute of Behavioral Science of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado.
Kenneth E. Boulding was born in Liverpool, England, in 1910. He received his B.A. from Oxford University. In 1937 he migrated to the United States.
In 1968 he was president of the American Economic Association. Since 1970 he has been president of the Association for the Study of Grants Economy.
He has written some fourteen books, of which we mention Economic Analysis (1941), The Economy of Love and Fear: A Preface to Grants Economics (1973), Economics of Peace (1945), The Skills of the Economist (1958), Principles of Economic Policy (1959), Conflict and Defense (1962), Disarmament and the Economy (1963), The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (1964), The Impact of Social Sciences (1966), Peace and the War Industry (1970), and Economic Imperialism (1972).

Granted that wolf-crying is dangerous business, would you say, however, that the Club of Rome represents a real wolf?1

 

As I have said in my reviews of The Limits of Growth and World Dynamics,2 the Club of Rome has identified a real wolf and his name is ‘Finitude.’ If I may be permitted an outrageous pun, however, not even the Forrester knows how far off in the forest he is, or whether he is advancing into the Meadows. The problem here is our inability to predict the future of knowledge, which is the most crucial element in the dynamics of society. This is not an inability which can be overcome by better methods, for it is inherent in the very concept of knowledge. If we could predict what we are going to know in the future, we would know it now - we would not have to wait! This does not prevent

us from making useful guesses about the future of knowledge which have some degree of probability of being right, but it does mean that we should always be prepared to be surprised. The record of past predictions is very poor, and there is no reason to suppose that present predictions are any better than past ones.

 

You have called the world economy an ‘econosphere.’3

 

We have to study the earth as a total system, and our knowledge about this system is still very primitive. In this regard, the natural sciences may be even more backward than the social sciences. We know more about very small things and about very large things than we do about medium-sized things like the earth. We do not know what produced the ice ages, we do not understand the dynamics of the atmosphere, we know very little about the oceans, we really know very little about the long-run dynamics of the biosphere, ecology as a science is not much better than cultural anthropology (interesting stories about strange species!), and we do not even know whether human activity is warming the earth up or cooling it down. There is real danger of a credibility gap developing, especially in the natural sciences, where all sorts of wild statements are being made about things we do not know very much about. The various systems of the earth - the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the sociosphere - each have a certain degree of independence, but we must study their interactions.

We must avoid getting too much trapped in concepts of equilibrium, which is a construct of the human mind unknown in the real world, although a very useful construct, if used properly. The earth has been dominated by evolutionary processes for several billion years. These are fundamentally disequilibrium systems and it would be very surprising if evolution stops. There are indeed limits to growth, especially of any one species, but it is hard to visualize any limits to evolution, short of what Tennyson calls ‘the one far off divine event towards which the whole creation moves,’ about which we know very little.

 

What is wrong, really, with economics as a discipline in the latter part of this century?

 

What is wrong with economics is its inability to break through a framework of essentially Newtonian type models of equilibrium or very simple dynamics, into an evolutionary model which will throw light on

the real dynamic processes of society. Perhaps this is too much to ask economics, for what is needed is a general theory of social dynamics. The Marxian dialectic is an attempt at such a theory, but I believe it to be profoundly wrong. In the long run, society is dominated by evolutionary not dialectical processes, which are, as I have said, just the storms on the evolutionary tide. Dialectical theory, therefore, produces a great deal of illusion, that is, false consciousness, and I think has caused a great deal of human misery. I have no great objections to a profit-seeking economy, if this is interpreted broadly that people are likely to make decisions which they perceive to be to their advantage, and I am profoundly unimpressed with most of the current substitutes for the market, most of which involve the use of threat as a social organizer rather than exchange. I do not think there is moral superiority in threats. On the other hand, we do face a very profound problem in the world of creating a viable world social contract which will produce a dynamic that will move the great obscenities of war, destitution and alienation towards extinction. Neither capitalism nor socialism can do this. Both are obsolete in the light of the real problems of mankind. We now need a period of very hard social thinking and social invention.

 

Freeman Dyson speaks of the greening of the galaxy; and self-reproducing machines of half a million parts, machines that produce machines; von Neumann had the thing down on paper; Dyson feels it belongs to the probabilities in the future. What would ‘this cornucopia of science,’4 as Alexander King5 has called these developments, do to an ever-increasing world population? Make everyone idle? Will no one work anymore?

 

I am extremely skeptical about all technological predictions, simply because the record of all past predictions is so bad.

 

What about the future of computers to assist man finding solutions to his social problems?6

 

Computers being part of technology, my remarks about the inaccuracy of all technological prediction apply here also. So far, I have argued that their impact has not been very great. They are a useful substitute for mathematics, one of the weakest of the sciences, at least in its pencil-and-paper form. I am still waiting for a significant idea to come out of a computer model. Thus, the Forrester7 models are useful as Delphic

oracle, but there are practically no ideas in them that were not in Malthus. In terms of ordinary day-to-day life, so far computers have given us continuous compound interest in banks, easy airline reservations, and have destroyed no doubt a large number of square miles of forest in order to produce unreadable printout. The computer produces information, but information is not the same thing as knowledge. In fact, as I have emphasized, knowledge is usually gained by the orderly loss of information, not by accumulating it; by the filtering out of noise, not by the piling up of data. The computer may well produce more noise than it is worth, but I am prepared to be surprised about this. If the computer can throw real light on the human learning process, it will be worth all the external diseconomies that it seems to produce.

 

Carl R. Rogers8 feels the world is moving into a Skinnerian direction, which he seems to regret.

 

The Skinner9 models are fine for pigeons but not, I think, very good for people, for the very fundamental reason that the value system of a pigeon is largely imprinted in its nervous system by processes of genetic growth, whereas the value systems of man are very largely learned by processes that neither I nor Professor Skinner understand. The Skinner model seems to me to be about as simpleminded as economics, and I have a great deal of faith that the enormous complexity of real people will always outwit the simplicities of the theorist. Still, I think simple models should never be despised. They can always teach us something. They will be more effective teachers, however, if we do not believe them too literally.

 

From my tour d'horizon around some seventy men of letters and science I often found incomprehension and at times even utter disdain for each others' theories and work. Dr. Philip Handler (president, National Academy of Sciences) told me that a wide communication gap existed between most scientists: ‘They would not be able to write down on paper what divides them.’ How can peace ever be achieved on this shrinking planet if these problems of communication cannot be solved?

 

The parceling up of the great republic of learning among the noncommunicating and hostile nationalisms of the disciplines is just as deplorable as the divisions of mankind into noncommunicating and hostile nations and sects. Not that I would abolish either disciplines, nations, or sects,

for it is necessary for man to have small communities as well as large, and it is tremendously important to preserve variety of culture, if social evolution is to continue. The growth of knowledge is closely related to the practice of virtue, for instance, the practice of veracity, detachment and humility. Perhaps the greatest enemy of the growth of knowledge is pride, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins, and one to which, alas, the republic of learning is not immune. There is need indeed for middlemen in the knowledge industry. They will be despised, as middlemen usually are, but they will perform an essential function of building up communication among specialists.

Peace, whether in personal relations or in international relations, is something which has to be learned. It requires an evolutionary process in the direction of building up more complex forms of institutions, information, communication, and knowledge. It is now part of the fairly easily accessible evolutionary potential of mankind. This, indeed, is what gives one hope, for evolutionary potential does seem to have a mysterious tendency to be realized; how, we really do not know.


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