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The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
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Geoffrey West (Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies)
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Kenneth Boulding’s bon mot, ‘To believe that the economy can grow forever in a finite world, you have to be a madman or an economist’.
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Wolfgang Sachs (Planet Dialectics: Explorations in Environment and Development (Critique Influence Change))
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I have an uneasy feeling, for instance, that if the computer had been around at the time of Copernicus, nobody would have ever bothered with him, because the computers could have handled the Ptolemaic epicycles with perfect ease. Kenneth Boulding, ‘The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics’, 1966
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Dan Davies (The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind)
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The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a “break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes.” Several such “break boundaries” will be discussed later, including the one from stasis to motion, and from the mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world. One effect of the static photo had been to suppress the conspicuous consumption of the rich, but the effect of the speedup of the photo had been to provide fantasy riches for the poor of the entire globe.
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Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)