ABSTRACT
Boulding attached great importance to his notion of grants. In A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear (1981), he argued that grants economics covers a large field of economic phenomena and is more than, and includes, neoclassical economics. He clearly had high expectations of this idea of his. He founded, together with a few associates, the Association for the Study of Grants Economy and became its first president. A few studies appeared (e.g. Pfaff 1976) but the publication of A Preface turned out to be more or less the swan song of the enterprise. References in the literature dwindled rapidly. Randall Wray concludes in his 1994 review that grants economics simply failed to attract the attention of economists (Wray 1994). He blames Boulding’s special and somewhat fuzzy framework.
