Talk:Samuel Bowles (economist)

Started this article

So I started this article after I read Democracy and Capitalism, and most of the information I culled from his personal website or other bios on other sites. His stuff is definitely interesting and wide-ranging, hopefully the article can expand to include some good explanation of his beliefs and arguments.

Also, I included this in the Philosophy wikiproject since so much of his work deals with economic philosophy, liberalism, neo-marxism, and the philosophy of education. Sam 00:00, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

This article needs to be expanded. A good source for info on Bowles is the 2000 edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists. The current article only touches on his current interests. However, he appears to have made large changes in focus in the early 1970s and early 1990s. He started off writing on conventional economic theory. He then wrote on radical economics, particularly on the Conflict Theory of the Firm, Education and critiques of orthodox human capital theorry, and the Social Structure of accumulation. Since the early 1990s (I would put the turning point at the Bowles and Gintis article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives of 1993) he has focused on a somewhat more conventional "post Walrasian" economics focusing on incomplete contracts that are costly to enforce and incomplete information, as well as in somewhat related research into behavioral and experimental economics. While still left of most of the economics mainstream, his politics have gotten considerably less radical as well. - the preceding unsigned comment was made by user: 65.35.245.113, on August 22 2006, 1:41 UTC

This entry is incomprehensible

I looked up Bowles in Wikipedia because I saw his recent articles in Science magazine, specifically the "Moral Sentiments" article, 320:1605.

I can understand his articles in Science, but I can't understand this entry at all. The section, "Academic Work and Interests," is incomprehensible. Don't take my word for it, show it to a non-economist and ask him to explain what it means.

Can somebody explain in simple language (without jargon) what Bowles' ideas are? Don't forget that Wikipedia is written for the non-specialist WP:MTAA.

In particular, I can't make heads or tails out of that huge bibliography. Are there one or two entries that are available on the Internet, and good introductions to his ideas? Nbauman (talk) 01:35, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Removed Scholarly Articles

I removed the following list. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 15:26, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

• "The Efficient Allocation of Resources in Education," Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 81, No. 2. (May, 1967):189-219 (winner of the Goldsmith Prize).
• "The Determinants of Scholastic Achievement: An Appraisal of Some Recent Evidence," Journal of Human Resources, (Winter 1968) (with Henry M. Levin).
• "Migration as Investment: Empirical Tests of the Human Investment Approach to Geographical Mobility," Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. LII, No. 4, (November 1970):356-362.
• "The Aggregation of Labor Inputs in the Study of Growth and Planning: Experiments with a Two-Level CES Function," Journal of Political Economy, 78,1 (January/February 1970):68-81.
• "Schooling and Inequality from Generation to Generation," Journal of Political Economy, (May/June 1972):S219-S251.
• "The `Inheritance of IQ' and the Intergenerational Reproduction of Economic Inequality," Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. LVI, No. 1, (February 1974):39-51 (with Valerie Nelson).
• “The Problem With Human Capital Theory,” American Economic Review 65,2 (May 1975):74-82.
• "Capitalist Development and Educational Structure," World Development, 6 (April 1978):783-796.
• "Technical Change and the Profit Rate: A Simple Proof of the Okishio Theorem," Cambridge Journal of Economics 5 (Summer 1981):183-186.
• “The Welfare State and Long-Term Economic Growth: Marxian, Neoclassical, and Keynesian Approaches,” American Economic Review, 72, 2 (May 1982):341-345.
• “Long Swings and the Non-reproductive Cycle,” American Economic Review, 73(2)((May 1983):152-157.
• "The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Marxian, and Neo-Hobbesian Models," American Economic Review, 76,1, (March, 1985):16-36.
• "The Cost of Job Loss and the Incidence of Strikes," Review of Economics and Statistics, LXIX, 4 (November, 1987):584-592 (with Juliet Schor).
• "Labor Discipline and Aggregate Demand: A Macroeconomic Model," American Economic Review, 78, 2 (May, 1988):395-400 (with Robert Boyer).
• "Contested Exchange: Political Economy and Modern Economic Theory," in American Economic Review, 78, 2 (May, 1988), 145-150 (with Herbert Gintis).
• "Business Ascendancy and Economic Impasse: A Structural Retrospective on Conservative Economics, 1979-1986," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 3,1, (Winter 1989):107-134 (with David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf).
• "Power and Wealth in a Competitive Capitalist Economy," Philosophy and Public Affairs 21,4 (Fall, 1992):324-353 (with Herbert Gintis).
• "The Revenge of Homo economicus: Post-Walrasian Economics and the Revival of Political Economy," Journal of Economic Perspectives 7,1(Winter, 1993):83- 102 (with Herbert Gintis).
• "The Moral Economy of Communities: Structured Populations and the Evolution of Pro-social Norms," Evolution and Human Behavior 19,1 (January, 1998):3-25 (with Herbert Gintis).
• "Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and other Economic Institutions" Journal of Economic Literature XXXVI (March, 1998):75-111.
• "Is Equality Passé? The Evolution of Reciprocity and the Future of Egalitarian Politics" Boston Review (Fall, 1998):4-10 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Reciprocity, Self interest and the Welfare State” Nordic Journal of Political Economy 26,1(January, 2000) (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Walrasian Economics in Retrospect,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, (November, 2000):1411-1439 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Economic Institutions as Ecological Niches,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23,1(February, 2000): 148-149.
• “In Search of Homo economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Simple Societies” American Economic Review 91,2(May, 2001):73-78 (with R.Boyd, C. Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, Joe Henrich, and R. McElreath).
• “Incentive enhancing preferences” American Economic Review, 91,2(May 2001):155- 158 (with Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne).
• “Costly Signaling and Cooperation,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 213 2001):103-119 (with Herbert Gintis and Eric Smith).
• “Individual Behavior and Social Interactions” Sociological Methodology, 31 (2001):89-96.
• “The Inheritance of Inequality” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16,3(Summer, 2002):1-28 (with Herbert Gintis).
• "The Determinants of Individual Earnings: A Behavioral Approach,” Journal of Economic Literature XXXIX(December, 2001): 1136-1176 (with Herbert Gintis and Melissa Osborne)
• “Homo reciprocans,” Nature, January 10, 2002: pp 125-128 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “‘Social Capital’ and Community Governance,” Economic Journal, 112(483) (November, 2002):F419-436 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Explaining Altruistic Behavior in Humans” Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(2003):153-172 (co- authored with Gintis, Robert Boyd and Ernst Fehr).
• “The co-evolution of individual behaviors and social institutions” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 223(2):135-147. (2002, with Jung-Kyoo Choi and Astrid Hopfensitz).
• “The evolution of altruistic punishment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 100(6) (March 18, 2003):3531-3535 (with Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, and Peter Richerson).
• “Persistent Parochialism: the Dynamics of Trust and Exclusion in Networks,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 55, 2004, pp1-23 (with Herbert Gintis)
• “The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in heterogeneous populations” Theoretical Population Biology, 65(2004):17-28 (with Herbert Gintis)
• “Economic Man in Cross Cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Simple Societies” with Joe Henrich, Robert Boyd, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Herbert Gintis, and Richard McElreath, Behavioral and Brain Science. Free text
• "Genetic relatedness predicts South African migrant workers’ remittances to their families." Nature (17 March, 2005) with Dorrit Posel.
• “Emulation, Inequality, and Work Hours: Was Thorsten Veblen Right?” (with Yongjin Park) Economic Journal, 2005.
• “Guard Labor” (with Arjun Jayadev) Journal of Development Economics, 2006, vol. 79, issue 2, pages 328-348.

Articles That Have Appeared in Anthologies or Collaborative Projects

I also removed the following list. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 15:28, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

• "Hearts and Minds: A Social Model of U.S. Productivity Growth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Washington D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1983, Volume 2, pp 381-450 (with Thomas Weisskopf and David Gordon).
• "Long-Term Growth and the Cyclical Restoration of Profitability," in Michael Kruger, Richard Goodwin, and Alessandro Vercelli, eds, Nonlinear Models of Fluctuating Growth, Berlin: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, 1984, pp 86-102 (with David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf).
• "Social Institutions and Technical Change," in M. DeMatteo, Alessandro Vercelli and Richard Goodwin, eds, Technological and Social Factors in Long Term Economic Fluctuations, Berlin: Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, 1986, pp 67-88.
• "Wealth Inequality, Wealth Constraints and Economic Performance," in A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2000 (with Pranab Bardhan and Herbert Gintis).
• “Individual Interactions, Group Conflicts, and the Evolution of Preferences,” in Steven Durlauf and Peyton Young, eds., Social Dynamics Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001, pp 155-190.
• “The Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status: Education, Class, and Genetics,” in Marcus Feldman, ed., Genetics, Behavior and Society, Volume 6 pp 4132-4141, in Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Oxford: Elsevier, 2001 (with Herbert Gintis.)
• “Globalization and Redistribution: Feasible Egalitarianism in a Competitive World” in Richard Freeman, ed., Inequality around the world London: Palgrave, 2002, pp 230-263.
• “Does Market Theory Apply to Biology” in Peter Hammerstein, ed., Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 153-165 (with Peter Hammerstein).
• “The origins of human cooperation” in Peter Hammerstein, ed., Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, pp. 430-443 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Strong Reciprocity and the Welfare State” in S.-C. Kolm, et.al., eds, The Handbook on the Economics of Giving, Reciprocity and Altruism, Oxford: Elsevier, 2004 (with Christina Fong and Herbert Gintis)
• “Pro-social emotions,” in The Economy as a Complex Evolving System III: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Arrow, L.Blume and Steven Durlauf, eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “Institutional Poverty Traps” in Poverty Traps, Bowles, Durlauf, and Hoff eds., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• “Social preferences and political behavior," in Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Behavior, Charles Tilly and Robert Goodin eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 (with Herbert Gintis).
• “The evolution of collective action," in Oxford Handbook on Political Economy. Donald Wittman and Barry Weingast eds., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 (with Herbert Gintis).

Works in Progress (According to the Author, July 2005)

This is the third list I removed. Wikipedia articles are not the place to dumb this kind of data. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 15:30, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

• A Cooperative Species: Human Sociality and its Evolution (manuscript in preparation,

with Herbert Gintis.)

• “The First Property Rights Revolution,” Santa Fe Institute Working Paper, (with Jungkyoo Choi)
• “Power and Conflict in Biological Markets,” (with Peter Hammerstein).
• “Parochial altruism” (with Jung Kyoo Choi).
• “Culture Matters: Interpretation and Inferences from Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small Scale Societies,” to appear in Melissa Brown, Toward a Science of Culture (with Herbert Gintis).
• "Institutional equilibrium selection by intentional idiosyncratic play." Santa Fe Institute working paper, with Suresh Naidu (under review at Journal of Economic Theory).
• “Equality’s Fate: a natural history.”
• “Social Segregation and the Dynamics of Group Inequality” (with Rajiv Sethi).
• “Social Preferences and Public Policy,"

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Samuel Bowles (economist)/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

It's nice that there is a picture and an infobox, but the article needs to be expanded and organized. Green caterpillar 00:12, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Last edited at 00:12, 8 September 2006 (UTC). Substituted at 05:22, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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