Samuel Stebbins Bowles (; born June 1, 1939),
is an American economist and Professor Emeritus at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
, where he continues to teach courses on
microeconomics
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 fo ...
and the theory of institutions. His work belongs to the
neo-Marxian (variably called post-Marxian) 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.
Biography
Bowles, the son of U.S. Ambassador and Connecticut Governor
Chester Bowles
Chester Bliss Bowles (April 5, 1901 – May 25, 1986) was an American diplomat and ambassador, governor of Connecticut, congressman and co-founder of a major advertising agency, Benton & Bowles, now part of Publicis Groupe. Bowles is best known f ...
, graduated with a B.A. from
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
in 1960, where he was a founding member of the
Yale Russian Chorus
The Yale Russian Chorus is a tenor-bass choral ensemble at Yale University, established in 1953 by Denis Mickiewicz, a student at the Yale Music School, and George Litton, president of the Yale Russian Club. The group sings a variety of secular a ...
, participating in their early tours of the Soviet Union. Subsequently, he received his Ph.D. in economics from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
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
Herbert Gintis (February 11, 1940 – January 5, 2023) was an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture co ...
,
Stephen Resnick
Stephen Alvin Resnick (; October 24, 1938 – January 2, 2013) was an American heterodox economist. He was well known for his work (much of it written together with Richard D. Wolff) on Marxian economics, economic methodology, and class analysis ...
,
Richard D. Wolff
Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor ...
and Richard Edwards as part of a "radical package." Currently, Bowles is a professor of economics at the
University of Siena
The University of Siena ( it, Università degli Studi di Siena, abbreviation: UNISI) in Siena, Tuscany, is one of the oldest and first publicly funded universities in Italy. Originally called ''Studium Senese'', the institution was founded in 1240 ...
, Italy and the Arthur Spiegel Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, includ ...
in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Additionally, Bowles continues to teach graduate-level courses in microeconomics at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
.
In 2006, Bowles was awarded the Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory by the
Global Development and Environment Institute
The Global Development And Environment Institute (GDAE, pronounced “gee-day”) is a research center at Tufts University founded in 1993. GDAE conducts research and develops teaching materials in economics and related areas that follow an interdi ...
. He was elected fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
in 2020.
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
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, includ ...
, 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
There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income (the amount of money people are paid) and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth (the amount of we ...
, with emphasis on the relationship between wealth inequalities, incomplete contracts, and governance of economic transactions in firms, markets, families and communities."
Bowles frequently collaborates with his former colleague
Herbert Gintis
Herbert Gintis (February 11, 1940 – January 5, 2023) was an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture co ...
(another Emeritus Professor of Economics from Umass Amherst), both of whom were asked by
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
to write background papers for the 1968
Poor People's March. 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 The Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics Project (CORE Econ) is an organisation that creates and distributes open-access teaching material on economics. The goal is to make teaching material and reform the economics curriculum. Its textbook ...
which seeks to update the undergraduate curriculum to integrate topics such as altruism, inequality and
environmental economics
Environmental economics is a sub-field of economics concerned with environmental issues. It has become a widely studied subject due to growing environmental concerns in the twenty-first century. Environmental economics "undertakes theoretical or ...
. He is a member of its steering group.
It has published a free, online open-access textbook called ''The Economy'', for which Bowles is one of the authors.
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 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. 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
Ernst Fehr (born 21 June 1956 in Hard, Austria) is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the ...
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
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...
'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, "
centives 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
Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it will be unable to replenish. The term app ...
", 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 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".
Samuel Bowles
Home Page of the Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance
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:
# 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?
# 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?
# How do economic disparities among citizens affect bargaining, policy making, and economic performance at a national level?
# 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
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* Original printed in 1976.
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See also
* Capital accumulation
Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form o ...
* Institutional economics
Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the Sociocultural evolution, evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping Economy, economic Human behavior, behavior. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instin ...
* Marxian economics
Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a Heterodox economics, heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx, Karl Marx's Critique of political economy#Marx's critique of politic ...
* Supply-side economics
Supply-side economics is a macroeconomic theory that postulates economic growth can be most effectively fostered by lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, and allowing free trade. According to supply-side economics, consumers will benefit fr ...
References
External links
Samuel Bowles' Webpage at the SFI
which includes CV other academic information
The MacArthur Research Network on Preferences
The MacArthur Research Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bowles, Samuel
Neuroeconomists in Psychiatry
1939 births
Behavioral economists
Complex systems scientists
Marxian economists
Living people
Scientists from New Haven, Connecticut
Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni
Yale University alumni
University of Siena faculty
University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty
Santa Fe Institute people
Economists from Connecticut
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences