Below is my combined Book Thing haul for yesterday and today. It includes one remarkable find, Kenneth Bouldings The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, published in 1964. I knew of Boulding only that he is among the 100 economists featured in Mark Blaugs Great Economists since Keynes, Still, I would have put the book back on the shelf had I not happened to notice--its an autographed copy (not an uncommon thing to find at BT). Below his signature Boulding had written, Baltimore, Feb 18 1966. Did he teach at Hopkins at some point, I wondered? Worth finding out more about him, I decided. So I brought the book home. From Blaugs book I learned that Boulding was an Oxford-educated Brit who moved to America in the 1930s. He taught at several universities--but not Hopkins; he must have been in town for a lecture--and was at U. of Colorado, Boulder, until his death in 1993. Boulding was brilliant enough to get first his first article published in the Economic Journal at age 22, and in 1949 he was only the second winner of the newly established John Bates Clark Medal, which the AEA awards every two years to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. The first was Paul Samuelson, and the next after Boulding was Milton Friedman. Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Larry Summers are among more recent winners. So this guy was a heavy-hitter. Many Clark medalists (including four of the five just named) have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, but it seems Boulding was not one to stay in the prescribed lanes. Rather, his voluminous writing roamed all across the social sciences, which he hoped to unite into a single discipline. That refusal to focus on economics cost him the attention, although not the respect, of his fellow economists. But it endears him to my muse, who is as inconstant with respect to subject matters as she is with respect to time. It will be interesting to see to what extent his interests overlap with, and can inform, my own.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 23:07:22 +0000
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