Linked with Social Preferences and Public Economics, and with Is Equality Passé?
Samuel Bowles is an American economist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught courses on microeconomics and the theory of institutions. Bowles graduated with a B.A. from Yale in 1960 and afterwards, continued on to get his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1965. 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. (full text).
Wikipedia’s disambiguation page about two Samuel Bowles.
Bowles’ recent papers and other information can be found on his webpage; also on Sam Bowles’.
Read: The Inheritance of Inequality, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, July 14, 2002.
Samuel Bowles – USA
Samuel Bowles in the Santa Fe Institute, and his Abbreviated CV in University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
On his website at the Sante 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. »
The second is 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 ». He 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. 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. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and books, and is currently working with Gintis on the manuscript for A Cooperative Species: Human Sociality and its Evolution. (full text).
He is the co-author of Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change (3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 2000) and After the Waste Land: A Democratic Economics for the Year 2000 (M.E. Sharpe, 1991). With Herbert Gintis he is studying the structure of labor and capital markets, the organization of work, and the evolution of norms and preferences. Their most recent book is Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Markets, States and Communities (Verso, 1998). Their first book was Schooling in Capitalist America (Basic Books, 1975). They also wrote Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (Basic Books, 1986) in which they trace the connections – theoretical, historical, and contemporary – between democracy and capitalism. Bowles currently teaches courses in microeconomics and the theory of institutions. He is co-head of the MacArthur Foundation research group on the costs of inequality. (text).
Read: Social Capital and Community Governance, December 2000.
His books: on amazon; on wikipedia; on MIT press; on onlinebooks library; on librarything; on allbookstores.com.
Read in german: Die Gemeinschaft als Regelmechanismus, Das «Soziale Kapital» zwischen Markt und Staat.
links:
Sozialkapital und ökonomische Steuerung;
the European Science days in Steyr 2001 / die Europäischen Wissenschaftstage in Steyr 2001;
about Samuel Bowles’ text: on group competition and relatedness as important factors in human cooperation.