Kenneth Boulding's Evolutionary Perspective - Perspectives

Perspectives

One of the first major perspectives of Boulding's evolutionary perspective was his emphasis on know-how or, to use the term of Vladimir Vernadsky (1926) and Teilhard de Chardin (1959), which Boulding used as well, the "Noosphere." This is the counterpart in social and economic evolution to the role of genetic information and DNA in biological evolution. Just as DNA provides the genetic know-how to produce a chicken from an egg, automotive engineers and their recording devices contain the know-how to produce an automobile.

One of the first major neoclassical casualties of this perspective comes from Boulding's critique of the usual factors of production, land labor, and capital:

It is much more accurate to identify the factors of production as know-how (that is genetic information structure), energy, and materials, for, as we have seen, all processes of production involve the direction of energy by some know-how structure toward the selection, transportation, and transformation of materials into the product.

"Labor" is a category marginally useful to Boulding for studying distribution, but of no use whatever for studying production. Boulding's factors of production are know-how, materials and energy; hence, a theory which holds labor—a heterogeneous collection of artifacts of know-how, energy and materials—as the source of value in the production process has "all the scientific validity of the medieval elements of earth, air, fire, and water."

Another former president of the American Economic Association, Georgescu-Roegen, also began to dissent from orthodox economics for reasons not dissimilar to Boulding. In his classic work, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Georgescu-Roegen issued a call for the end of the circular flow diagrams used in mainstream thought and textbooks in which the production and circulation process are detached from the physical reality, the scale, of the planet's resources and pollution sinks. He called for greater attention to be given to the second law of thermodynamics – that it be treated as a cornerstone of the mainstream paradigm. Boulding can be seen as addressing this call. Once one considers the possibility that labor can be seen as an intermediate surrogate for more fundamental factors, like know-how, materials and energy, then it is a short step to treat (as Boulding sometimes does) capital as a surrogate for know-how and land as surrogate for material resources and the traditional factors of production, land, labor and capital, are easily rearticulated as know-how, energy and materials. If and when that sort of transformation in thought takes place, professional attention will immediately be focused on the throughput resulting from the production and consumption process. With the rising perception of environmental degradation and the unrelenting thrust of the environmental movement, there is every reason to expect the profession to include throughput as a centerpiece in the production process. Boulding's factors of production accomplish this task.