ABSTRACT
Boulding’s 1973 article on cultural economics opens by pointing at the gradual, though almost complete, elimination of any notion of cultural context from economic models. In his words:
The loss of interest within the economics profession in the cultural matrix of its own discipline is a fairly continuous process, almost from the days of Adam Smith. David Ricardo, perhaps, was one of the first culprits in the process of reducing economics to a culturally free abstraction […] The marginalist school […] removed economics even further from its cultural matrix […] In the present generation, as far as economic theory is concerned, abstraction has completely conquered the field. One can look in vain, for instance, through issue after issue of the American Economic Review to try to find anything which even remotely suggests a cultural context.
(Boulding 1973, pp. 47–48)