Samuel Bowles (economist)

Samuel Bowles (born 1939) is an American economist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught courses on microeconomics and the theory of institutions.

Biography

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. In 1973 Bowles was hired, along with Herbert Gintis, Stephen Resnick, Richard D. Wolff and Richard Edwards as part of the "radical package" that was hired by the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he taught until 2001.

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 he was awarded the Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory by the Global Development and Environment Institute.

Work

Bowles has challenged economic theories that free markets and inequality maximize efficiency, and argued that self-interested financial...
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