Samuel Bowles (economist)
Samuel Bowles | |
---|---|
Neo-Marxian economics | |
Alma mater | Harvard University (PhD) Yale University (B.A.) |
Influences | Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi |
Contributions | Schooling in Capitalist America |
Samuel Stebbins Bowles (
Biography
Bowles, the son of U.S. Ambassador and Connecticut Governor
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 collaborated with his former colleague
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.[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 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:
- 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
- Bowles, Samuel (1969). Planning educational systems for economic growth. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674670907.
- 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; ISBN 9780444853257.
- Also as Bowles, Samuel; Kendrick, David;
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780385183451.
- Also as Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780860918233.
- Also as Bowles, Samuel;
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780465016006.
- Also as Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780415608817.
- Also as Bowles, Samuel;
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780415185424.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9781859842553.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780691004686.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780199262052.
- Bowles, Samuel (2006). Microeconomics: behavior, institutions, and evolution. Princeton, New Jersey Woodstock: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691126388.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780691136202.
- Bowles, Samuel; 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; ISBN 9780691125190.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780691128795.
- Bowles, Samuel; ISBN 9780691158167.
- Bowles, Samuel; 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
- ^ "Bowles, Samuel". Library of Congress. Retrieved October 30, 2014.
data view (born Jan. 6, 1939)
- ^ Samuel Bowles Archived August 30, 2006, at the Wayback Machine UMass Amherst Dept. of Economics Faculty.
- JSTOR 4226169.
- JSTOR 2109713.
- JSTOR 4538355.
- ^ Samuel Bowles, "Post-marxian economics: Labour, learning and history", Social Science Information, Volume 24 (3): 507, SAGE – September 1, 1985.
- ^ Barry Stewart Clark, Political economy: a comparative approach, ABC-CLIO, 1998, p. 67.
- ^ Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Cullenberg, "Marxism and Post-Marxism", Social Text 15 (Fall 1986), 126–135.
- ISBN 9780511983580. Retrieved November 27, 2012.
- ^ Schaffer, Howard B., Chester Bowles: New Dealer in the Cold War, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 13.
- ^ UMass Amherst Fall 2010 Schedule of Classes Archived June 29, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Samuel S. Bowles". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved January 7, 2021.
- ^ Samuel Bowles
- ^ "Born Poor? Santa Fe economist Samuel Bowles says you better get used to it"
- ^ CORE Project.
- S2CID 20130878.
- ^ Samuel Bowles Home Page of the Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance
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