ABSTRACT
Kenneth Boulding has always been one of my heroes, so it was reassuring to find out, when 1 spent Sunday 25 May talking with him in Melbourne,1 that he really is a hero; it was even more reassuring to find that he has two Achilles’ heels. He thinks sports are boring and he does not like Marx or Marxism - neither entirely unprejudiced judgements, he readily admits. Born in 1910 in Liverpool, the only son of a plumber, and an only grandson - Elise Boulding says he had three mothers - Boulding was the first in the family for 300 years to go on to secondary and then tertiary education. He had a brilliant undergraduate record at New College, Oxford (1928-32), went to Chicago as a Commonwealth Fellow in 1932, and subsequently taught at Edinburgh (1934-7), Colgate (1937-41), Iowa State (1943-9), Michigan (1949-67) and Colorado (196781). Now a vigorous 72, he is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Colorado, and is about to do a stint at Swarthmore following an extraordinary itinerary as R.I. Downing Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He still packs more illumination into his famous one-liners than most of us get into even a Marshallian-type footnote.
