From Abundance to Scarcity Implications for the American Tradition

116 Pages·2006·6.64 MB·English

The Hammond Lectures
Number 1
From Abundance to Scarcity
Implications
for the American Tradition
Kenneth E. Boulding

Michael Kammen

Seymour Martin Lipset

Number 1

From Abundance to Scarcity
Implications
for the American Tradition
Kenneth E. Boulding
Michael Kammen
Seymour Martin Lipset
With an Introduction by Richard C. Snyder
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS: Columbus
Copyright © 1978 by the Ohio State University Press
All Rights Reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Boulding, Kenneth Ewart, 1910­
From abundance to scarcity.
(The Hammond lectures; no. 1)
CONTENTS: Boulding, K. E. The limits to progress in
evolutionary systems.—Kammen, M. From scarcity to
abundance—to scarcity?—Lipset, S. M. Growth, affluence,
and the limits of futurology.
1. Economic history—1945—Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Economic development—Addresses, essays, lectures. 3.
Social history—1945—Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Un­
ited States—Economic conditions—1971—Addresses, es­
says, lectures. 5. Forecasting—Addresses, essays, lectures. I.
Kammen, Michael G., joint author. II. Lipset, Seymour Mar­
tin, joint author. III. Title. IV. Series.
HC59.B653 330.9'047 77-16415
ISBN 0-8142-0288-8
Contents

Introduction 7
By Richard C. Snyder
The Limits to Progress in Evolutionary Systems 17
By Kenneth E. Boulding
From Scarcity to Abundance—to Scarcity?
Some Implications for the American Tradition
from the Perspective of a Cultural Historian 37
By Michael Kammen
Growth, Affluence, and the Limits of Futurology 65
By Seymour Martin Lipset

Richard C. Snyder
Introduction to the
Hammond Lecture Series
i
The Graduate School of the Ohio State University is
privileged to publish the first Hammond Lectures, which
were given originally on the successive evenings of 18, 19,
and 20 October 1976. This event is made possible by the
thoughtful generosity of a deceased alumnus, Dr. William A.
Hammond, M.A. 1917 and Ph.D. 1929, whose gift was in­
tended to stimulate a series of presentations focused on the
American Tradition.
A faculty committee1 chose for the inaugural occasion the
theme of "From Abundance to Scarcity: Implications for the
American Tradition," and selected three distinguished
scholars—Michael Kammen, Kenneth Boulding, and
Seymour Martin Lipset—to address the theme from the van­
tage points of their respective disciplines.2
Thus it was expected that the campus-wide university
community and (later) the readers of this publication would
benefit from a kind of multidisciplinary triangulation on a
very complex subject, i.e., the simultaneous interplay of
three perspectives: that of the cultural historian (Kammen),
that of the economist/social scientist (Boulding), and that of
the political sociologist (Lipset). These scholars are noted
8 Introduction
not only for their outstanding reputations within single dis­
ciplines but for their unusual capacity and willingness to
transcend the constraints of specialization in their writing
and teaching.
II
As we all have come to realize, it is not easy to stimulate
intelligent discourse on significant social and political prob­
lems even in a university setting. The barriers to purposeful,
provocative, and penetrating exploration of alternative
ideas and multiple realities that manages to combine depth
and breadth, knowledge and action, theory-based research
and policy concerns, are well known. Among the many
inhibiting factors that wind Liliputian threads around our
efforts to mount sustained public dialogues that might en­
rich and clarify thought and decision are, of course, such
familiar ones as: the confusing effects of the use of diverse
specialized vocabularies, recurrent confrontations of dog­
matic arguments, the deliberate manipulation of empty or
ambiguous symbols to shape attitudes or behaviors, the lack
of widely shared societal memories of key past events rele­
vant to contemporary issues, and stubborn technical puzzles
that do not yield easily to solutions, much less to impati­
ence.
In a very real sense, the 1976 Hammond Lecture theme
has, as does the cluster of related conditions and sub-issues
on which it exercises gravitational pull, a dual aspect: on the
one hand, scarcity and abundance of certain prime resources
have, as the three lecturers remind us, exerted a profound
shaping influence on the evolution of the American socio­
political system; on the other hand, the nature, extent, and
consequences of different amounts—of the supply of any set
of resources on hand as it were—is also a matter of conflict­
ing perceptions and judgments and not necessarily of objec­