Kenneth Boulding – normative soc sci

http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/boulding-kenneth-e.pdf

Kenneth Boulding would have nothing to do with the
idea of a nonnormative social science.

In reading through Boulding’s work one is astonished at
how far he anticipated ideas that were reinvented years later
and that many social scientists have not yet tumbled to.
Back in 1958 he took up ecological questions:
Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed
for the immediate benefit of man? . . . Does man have any responsibility
for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of
rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?
And even in his early conventional years one detects a note
of irony in his couplet:

The wise economist is loath
To give up anything for growth.6