Towards a New Economics: Critical Essays on Ecology, Distribution and Other Themes.

• Author: Quddus, Munir

Kenneth Boulding, a great economist, and perhaps the foremost social scientist of this century, in this capstone work, has served us a delightful platter of thoughts, ideas, insights and analysis from his enormous lifetime contributions. It has always been a mystery to me and to many others familiar with his wide ranging and path breaking contributions to economics and other social sciences, why the Nobel committee denied him the ultimate award the profession can bestow, one that he so richly deserved. This book strengthens my view that no other contemporary social scientist with the possible exception of Herbert Simon and Georgescu-Roegen have made comparable contributions to such a wide range of disciplines.

The following statement, coming from an author whose lifetime publications include over 1,000 articles, over 500 book reviews and several important books, is significant: "In many ways the decade of the 1980s was the most productive decade of my life, and these articles are an excellent sample of my work of those years. . . . The present volume, however, brings together various facets of my thinking in this period in a unique way, particularly those related to economics but also expanding into the more economic aspects of war and peace".

This book, which may be treated as the seventh volume of the published works of this prolific social scientist (the first six volumes published by the Colorado Associated University Press are out of print), contains 22 essays on at least 125 different themes on a wide variety of issues--from price theory and marxism to water problems, ecology, ethics, peace and human betterment. These essays are organized into five parts. The first essay in Part 1 is a fascinating bibliographical autobiography. It is a must reading for anyone who is thinking of becoming an academic and for others who wish to know more about the life and works of this remarkable man.

The broader themes in the essays include (1) the view that the world should be studied as a total system, (2) the importance of grants as one-way transfers in the economy, (3) the critique of the traditional "cookbook" theory of production, and (4) the description and analysis of the "generic" theory of production--that all products begin in some genetic structure of "know-how," and this know-how in turn has to be able to draw on energy, materials, space and time, all scarce factors, where the most limiting factor is the most important. Other more specific...