His curriculum vitae can be found here.
Samuel Bowles, (PhD, Economics, Harvard University, 1965) is at the Santa Fe Institute. He taught economics at Harvard from 1965 to 1973 and since then at the University of Massachusetts, where he is now emeritus professor, and at the University of Siena.
His studies on cultural and genetic evolution, much of it in collaboration with the late Herbert Gintis, have challenged the conventional economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by amoral self-interest. Recent papers have also explored how organizations, communities and nations could be better governed in light of the fact that altruistic and ethical motives are common in most populations. Bowles’ is now engaged in theoretical and empirical studies of political hierarchy and wealth inequality and their evolution over the very long run.
His scholarly papers have appeared in Science, Nature, New Scientist, American Economic Review, Theoretical Population Biology, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Econometrica, Antiquity, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Behavioral and Brain Science, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Harvard Business Review and Current Anthropology.
He has also advised the governments of Cuba, South Africa and Greece, South African President Nelson Mandela, U.S Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, the Legislature of the U.S. State of New Mexico, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Pontifical Academy of Science (Rome). He has also taught crash courses in economics to citizens with a need to know (environmentalists, trade unionists, welfare rights activists) in the U.S., Canada, and South Africa.
His recent books include (with Simon Halliday) a new intermediate level undergraduate textbook, Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (OUP 2022), and (with Weikai Chen), Allocation, Distribution and Policy: Notes, problems and solutions in microeconomic theory (Open Books, 2025), Other works include The Moral Economy: Why good laws are no substitute for good citizens (Yale University Press, 2016), A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its evolution (with Herbert Gintis, Princeton University Press, 2011), The new economics of inequality and redistribution, (Cambridge University Press, 2012), With Wendy Carlin and CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources for Economics) he has developed two new free online introductory e-textbooks, The Economy: Microeconomics, and Economy, Society, and Public Policy, for majors and non-majors, respectively (www.core-econ.org)
Arestis, P., and M. Sawyer, Eds. “Samuel Bowles.“ In A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, pp. 54- 59. Edward Elgar Publishing, 1992.
McCrate, E. “Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis.“ In American Economists of the Late Twentieth Century, pp. 1-17, edited by W. J. Samuels. Edward Elgar Publishing, 1996.
Remembering Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sam Bowles’ intellectual evolution over half a century in word clouds produced on his 70th birthday by Suresh Naidu.