The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth
By
Kenneth E. Boulding
, 1966
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We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of
himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations,
imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always
somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that
man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier. That is, there was always some place
else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of the deterioration of the natural
environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live. The
image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we
find it hard to get rid of.
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a
closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the
earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all
widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's
projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around
the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the
global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from
having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition
from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.
Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate
consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth. One hesitates to use the terms
"open" and "closed" in this connection, as they have been used with so many different shades of
meaning. Nevertheless, it is hard to find equivalents. The open system, indeed, has some similarities
to the open system of von Bertalanffy, in that it implies that some kind of a structure is maintained in
the midst of a throughput from inputs to outputs. In a closed system, the outputs of all parts of the
system are linked to the inputs of other parts. There are no inputs from outside and no outputs to the
outside; indeed, there is no outside at all. Closed systems, in fact, are very rare in human experience,
in fact almost by definition unknowable, for if there are genuinely closed systems around us, we have
no way of getting information into them or out of them; and hence if they are really closed, we would
be quite unaware of their existence. We can only find out about a closed system if we participate in
it. Some isolated primitive societies may have approximated to this, but even these had to take inputs
from the environment and give outputs to it. All living organisms, including man himself, are open
systems. They have to receive inputs in the shape of air, food, water, and give off outputs in the form
of effluvia and excrement. Deprivation of input of air, even for a few minutes, is fatal. Deprivation of
The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth
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