3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

Samuel Bowles (economist)

American economist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

LET'S KEEP IT SHORT BY SIMPLY ANSWERING THESE KEY QUESTIONS:

Can you list the top facts and stats about Samuel Bowles (economist)?

Summarize this article for a 10 years old

SHOW ALL QUESTIONS

Samuel Stebbins Bowles (/boʊlz/; born June 1, 1939),[1] is an American economist and
Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he continues to
teach courses on microeconomics and the theory of institutions.[2] His work belongs to
the neo-Marxian[3][4][5] (variably called post-Marxian)[6][7][8] tradition of economic thought.
However, his perspective on economics is eclectic and draws on various schools of
thought, including what he and others refer to as post-Walrasian economics.[9]

Quick facts: Samuel Bowles, Born, Institution, Field, Scho... ▼

Biography
Bowles, the son of U.S. Ambassador and Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles,[10]
graduated with a B.A. from Yale University in 1960, where he was a founding member of
the Yale Russian Chorus, participating in their early tours of the Soviet Union.
Subsequently, he received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1965 with the
thesis titled The Efficient Allocation of Resources in Education: A Planning Model with
Applications to Northern Nigeria. In 1973, the Economics Department of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, where Bowles taught until 2001, hired him along with Herbert
Gintis, Stephen Resnick, Richard D. Wolff and Richard Edwards as part of a "radical
package." Currently, Bowles is a professor of economics at the University of Siena, Italy
and the Arthur Spiegel Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences
Program at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Additionally, Bowles continues

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 1/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

to teach graduate-level courses in microeconomics at the University of Massachusetts

Amherst.[11]

In 2006, Bowles was awarded the Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to
economic theory by the Global Development and Environment Institute. He was elected
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.[12]

Work
Bowles has challenged economic theories that free markets and inequality maximize
efficiency and argued that self-interested financial incentives can produce behavior that is
inefficient and violates a society's morality. He has argued that economies with less
inequality, such as Asian countries, have outperformed economies with more inequality,
such as Latin American countries.

Academic work and interests

On his website at the Santa Fe Institute, he describes his two main academic interests as
first, "the co-evolution of preferences, institutions and behavior, with emphasis on the
modeling and empirical study of cultural evolution, the importance and evolution of non-
self-regarding motives in explaining behavior, and applications of these studies to policy
areas such as intellectual property rights, the economics of education and the politics of
government redistributive programs"; and the second being concerned with "the causes
and consequences of economic inequality, with emphasis on the relationship between
wealth inequalities, incomplete contracts, and governance of economic transactions in
firms, markets, families and communities."[13]

Bowles frequently collaborates with his former colleague Herbert Gintis (another Emeritus
Professor of Economics from Umass Amherst), both of whom were asked by Martin
Luther King Jr. to write background papers for the 1968 Poor People's March.[14] In
addition, he works with and is supported by the MacArthur Research Network on
Preferences, the MacArthur Research Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic
Performance and the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. Bowles was
one of the founders of economics curriculum reform initiative CORE Project which seeks
to update the undergraduate curriculum to integrate topics such as altruism, inequality
and environmental economics. He is a member of its steering group.[15] It has published a
free, online open-access textbook called The Economy, for which Bowles is one of the
authors.[15]

Bowles is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, among which A
Cooperative Species. Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (2011) and Schooling in Capitalist

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 2/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

America, first published in 1976.

Selfishness vs. altruism

Bowles has recently studied the way that people are motivated by selfishness and the
desire to maximize their own income as compared to altruism and the desire to do a good
job and be well regarded by others.[16] People act not only for material interests, but also
"to constitute themselves as dignified, autonomous, and moral individuals."

Behavioral experiments suggest that "economic incentives may be counterproductive

when they signal that selfishness is an appropriate response" and "undermine the moral
values that lead people to act altruistically". Bowles gives the example of day care centers
in Haifa, where a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at
the end of the day. Rather than avoiding late pick-ups, parents responded by doubling the
fraction of time they arrived late. After 12 weeks, the fine was revoked, but the enhanced
tardiness persisted unabated. According to Bowles, this illustrates a "kind of negative
synergy" between economic incentives and moral behavior, further stating: "The fine
seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid
inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another
commodity they could purchase".

Bowles cites research by Ernst Fehr and others establishing that behavioral experiments
modeling the voluntary provision of public goods show that "substantial fractions of most
populations adhere to moral rules, willingly give to others, and punish those who offend
standards of appropriate behavior, even at a cost to themselves and with no expectation
of material reward". Diego Rivera's mural of factory workers at Ford's River Rouge
assembly plant shows that according to Bowles organizations motivate members "by
appealing to other-regarding motives such as the desire to do a good job and a sense of
reciprocal obligations among members of a firm".

In most cases, "[i]ncentives undermine ethical motives" as they "may frame a decision
problem and thereby suggest self-interest as appropriate behavior". Simply using market
terminology offers justifications for actions that would otherwise be unjustifiable.
Economic structures of societies produce people with different values. In a game in which
individuals could choose how much to withdraw from a common pool ("the forest"), the
withdrawal that maximized the gains of the group was substantially less than the
withdrawal that maximized the gains of the individual. When subjects were trained in a
game with incentives to be selfish, they continue to be selfish even when they play in a
second game without those incentives. In a "regulation" model where individuals were
fined for "overexploitation", their behavior was entirely self-interested. In a society, "if the
relevant incentives allow the selfish to exploit the civic-minded, then the latter are less
likely to be copied". Studies of 15 small-scale societies shows that "individuals from the
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 3/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

more market-integrated societies were also more fair-minded" in that they made more
generous offers and preferred to reject an unfair offer even at the cost of receiving
nothing. In these societies, "individuals engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges with
strangers represent models of successful behavior who are then copied by others".

Inequality vs. economic success

"What is the relationship between inequality and the economic success of nations, firms,
and local communities?", Bowles asks. At the University of California, Berkeley, he and
other researchers have challenged two views long held by most economists, namely that
inequality goes hand-in-hand with a nation's economic success and that reducing
economic inequalities inevitably compromises efficiency. For instance, he wrote that "East
Asian countries with relatively level distributions of income have dramatically
outperformed Latin American countries with less equal income distributions. Investments
in the nutrition, health and education of poor children have produced not only more
economic opportunity but higher economic performance. Indeed, emerging economic
theory suggests that inequality may have adverse effects, blunting productive incentives
and fueling costly conflicts between haves and have-nots".[17]

The traditional debate has been polarized, Bowles said, between ideal models of equality
that overlooked the role of incentives and idealized models of the private market that
overlooked inequality.

The Berkeley group studied four questions:

1. How does inequality affect cooperation in local communities, and impact the local
environment and other public goods, like irrigation water, neighborhood safety and
other residential amenities, fisheries, forestry, and grazing lands?

2. How do inequalities affect the efficiency and productivity of farms, firms, and other
entities, and are there more efficient forms of governance that can be promoted?

3. How do economic disparities among citizens affect bargaining, policy making, and
economic performance at a national level?

4. What principles can guide the design of efficient and politically viable policies to
alleviate poverty and enhance economic opportunity for the less well off?

Publications
Bowles, Samuel (1969). Planning educational systems for economic growth. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674670907.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 4/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

Bowles, Samuel; Kendrick, David A. (1970). Notes and problems in microeconomic theory
(1st ed.). Chicago: Markham Publishing. ISBN 9780841020122.
Also as Bowles, Samuel; Kendrick, David; Dixon, Peter B. (1980). Notes and problems
in microeconomic theory. Amsterdam New York: North-Holland.
ISBN 9780444853257.

Bowles, Samuel; Gordon, David M.; Weisskopf, Thomas E. (1983). Beyond the waste land:
a democratic alternative to economic decline. Garden City, New York: Anchor
Press/Doubleday. ISBN 9780385183451.
Also as Bowles, Samuel; Gordon, David M.; Weisskopf, Thomas E. (1984). Beyond the
wasteland: a democratic alternative to economic decline. London: Verso.
ISBN 9780860918233.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (1986). Democracy and capitalism: property, community,
and the contradictions of modern social thought. New York: Basic Books.
ISBN 9780465016006.
Also as Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (2011). Democracy and capitalism property,
community, and the contradictions of modern social thought. London: Routledge.
ISBN 9780415608817.

Bowles, Samuel; Pagano, Ugo; Franzin, Maurizio (1999). The politics and economics of
power. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415185424.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (1998). Wright, Erik Olin (ed.). Recasting Egalitarianism:
new rules for communities, states, and markets. London, England: New York Verso.
ISBN 9781859842553.

Bowles, Samuel; Arrow, Kenneth; Durlauf, Steven (2000). Meritocracy and economic
inequality. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691004686.

Bowles, Samuel; Henrich, Joseph; Boyd, Robert; Camerer, Colin; Fehr, Ernst; Gintis,
Herbert (2004). Foundations of human sociality: economic experiments and ethnographic
evidence from fifteen small-scale societies. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 9780199262052.

Bowles, Samuel (2006). Microeconomics: behavior, institutions, and evolution. Princeton,

New Jersey Woodstock: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691126388.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert; Osborne Groves, Melissa (2005). Unequal chances:
family background and economic success. New York Princeton, New Jersey: Russell Sage
Foundation, Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691136202.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert; Fehr, Ernst; Boyd, Robert (2005). Moral sentiments and
material interests: the foundations of cooperation in economic life. Cambridge,
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 5/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262572378.

Bowles, Samuel; Roosevelt, Frank; Edwards, Richard (2005). Understanding capitalism:

competition, command, and change. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN 9780195138658.

Bowles, Samuel; Durlauf, Steven; Hoff, Karla (2006). Poverty traps. New York Princeton,
New Jersey: Russell Sage Foundation Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691125008.

Bowles, Samuel; Wallerstein, Michael; Bardhan, Pranab (2006). Globalization and

egalitarian redistribution. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
ISBN 9780691125190.

Bowles, Samuel; Bardhan, Pranab; Baland, Jean-Marie (2007). Inequality, cooperation, and
environmental sustainability. Princeton, New Jersey: Russell Sage Foundation, Princeton
University Press. ISBN 9780691128795.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (2011). A cooperative species human reciprocity and its
evolution. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691158167.

Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert (2011). Schooling in capitalist America: educational reform
and the contradictions of economic life. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.
ISBN 9781608461318. Original printed in 1976.

Bowles, Samuel (2016). The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for
Good Citizens. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300163803.

See also

References

External links

Institutional economics

Evolutionary psychology

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 6/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

Topics in game theory

September Group

Authority control

Enjoying Wikiwand?
Wikiwand is a leading donor to the Wikimedia Foundation, we pledge to give a
portion of our income to help Wikipedia thrive. By using Wikiwand, for FREE, you
directly contribute to keep Wikipedia alive.

Donate now 30% goes to Wikimedia!

Not right now, thanks

Related Articles

Microeconomics
Behavior of individuals and firms

Microeconomics is a branch of mainstream economics that studies the behavior of

individuals and firms in making decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources and
the interactions among these individuals and firms. Microeconomics focuses on the study of
individual markets, sectors, or industries as opposed to the national economy as whole, ...

Read article

Neoclassical economics
Approach to economics

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 7/8
3/22/23, 9:08 PM Samuel Bowles (economist) - Wikiwand

Neoclassical economics is an approach to economics in which the production, consumption,

and valuation (pricing) of goods and services are observed as driven by the supply and
demand model. According to this line of thought, the value of a good or service is
determined through a hypothetical maximization of utility by income-constrained
individuals...

Read article

Gary Becker
American economist (1930–2014)

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University
of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.

Read article

Market failure
Concept in public goods economics

In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and
services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic
value. Market failures can be viewed as scenarios where individuals' pursuit of pure self-
interest leads to results that are not efficient – that can be improved upo...

Read article

Homo economicus
Model of humans as rational, self-interested agents

The term Homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who
are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively
defined ends optimally. It is a word play on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories
and in pedagogy.

Read article

Load all related articles

Home About us FAQ Press Site map Terms of service Privacy policy

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) 8/8