What Jay Hanson and others might like to look at is the writings of
Kenneth Boulding, certainly a leading professional economist of his day
(1930's through 1970's, 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 discussiion of the physical reality that economics has
to deal with as an ecosystem in which "populations act and react upon
each other, and the equalibrium 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 epiteme of Boulding's revisionist economic
thinking and analyss, 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
textboook, 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.
Saul Silverman
