ABSTRACT
In 1986, in one of his 1000-odd articles, this one published in The American Economist in connection with receiving the John R. Commons Award from the undergraduate economics honorary society, Boulding told us what had gone wrong in economics up until then. Some of what he worried about in 1986 seems dated now. The nuclear threat, whose impetus, Boulding noted, was the Cold War, has since receded, and with it the wise concern that propelled so much of Boulding’s work in the public sphere. In 1986 we had lived since 1945 with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. By then our fears were perhaps not quite so vivid as in the 1950s, when American school children were drilled to hide, if the bombs fell, under their desks (the memory is the basis of a vulgar but funny spoof of a civil defense poster, which ends with “kiss your a‥ good-bye”). Yet Boulding the great Quaker pacifist was still in 1986 properly fearful, a fear which in most of us had by long acquaintance dulled—even the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was by then a fading memory. One can’t stand to attention, or hide under one’s desk, all the time. Boulding could stay alert to the reality of the threat because his fear was rooted in his solid Christian faith and his solid economic understanding, both.
