Kenneth Boulding's Evolutionary Perspective - Post-civilized Society

Post-civilized Society

Once the traditional factor of production (i.e. capital) is reinterpreted as know-how, one can easily conclude that know-how and the growth of knowledge are "the essential key to economic development. Investment, financial systems and economic organizations and institutions are in a sense only the machinery by which a knowledge process is created and expressed." ("Economic Development as an Evolutionary System"). Boulding (1961) (1964) embedded his view of development in a long-term perspective that envisages us as moving from our current "civilized society" to "post-civilized society". The driving force of this movement is science or the culture that supports science. Development of the third world is a critical part of the movement to a "post-civilized society".

His "post-civilized society" is not the stationary state of John Stuart Mill or Herman Daly, but it does have a stable population. As a young man in his twenties, Boulding took a position that we now refer to as neo-Malthusian. He argued that "the indication seems to be" that the (per-capita) income level at which the western world would only reproduce itself is one "that the actual standard of life can never reach." (1939, 107) Thirty years later, still prior to Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb (1969) and the limits-to-growth literature (e.g., Meadows, 1971), Boulding argued (1965) that it "is hard to avoid considerable pessimism" about the prospects of development, especially in countries with high birth rates, which could undermine the great potential of a post-civilized society.

His major contribution to this problem is probably the argument (1964) for tradable birth-right permits. His dissidence on this issue is political – it runs against the grain of the political climate both then and now. If he was correct about the emerging seriousness of the population problem and if that level of concern is one day reflected in popular political sentiment, there is every reason to expect the profession to embrace Boulding's call for tradable birth-right permits, since it is based squarely on neoclassical concern for efficiency.