Samuel Stebbins Bowles (; born June 1, 1939), 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. His work is associated with 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, 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 to teach graduate-level courses in microeconomics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 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.
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." Bowles frequently collaborated 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. 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. 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.
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