Samuel Bowles American economist Country: USA

Biography of Samuel Bowles

Samuel Bowles is an American economist and honorary professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught microeconomics and institutional economics. He was born in 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut. Bowles graduated from Yale University in 1960, where he was one of the founders and members of the Yale Russian Chorus and participated in their tour to the Soviet Union. This was quite unexpected, considering it was the height of the Cold War and the United States still vividly remembered the post-war anti-communist hysteria known as the "witch hunt."

In 1965, Bowles received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. After defending his dissertation, he remained at Harvard and was an assistant professor and later an adjunct professor of economics from 1965 to 1974. In 1973, Bowles, along with a group of other young economists including Herbert Gintis, Stephen Resnick, Richard D. Wolff, and Richard Edwards, were offered positions in the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where Professor Bowles taught until 2002.

In 1997, Bowles co-founded the Research Network on Inequality and Economic Performance and remained one of its directors until 2007. From 2002 to 2010, Samuel Bowles taught economics at the University of Siena, Italy, one of the oldest universities in the world. Additionally, from 2000 to 2003, he served as the head of the economic program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and since 2003, he has been leading the Santa Fe Institute's research program in behavioral sciences. In addition to these positions, Bowles continues to lecture on microeconomics for doctoral candidates at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has also collaborated with the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Kyoto in Japan, and Doshisha University in Japan.

In 2006, Bowles was awarded the Leontief Prize by the Global Development and Environment Institute for his outstanding contributions to economic theory. Samuel Bowles is the author of numerous articles published in specialized professional journals and over thirty books, many of which he co-authored with his colleagues at the University of Massachusetts. Currently, he is preparing for the release of his latest book, "Machiavelli's Mistake: Why good laws are no substitute for good Citizens," which is set to be published in 2011.

In his works, Samuel Bowles challenges economic theories such as the theory of the free market and the idea that inequality increases efficiency, arguing that selfish financial incentives can affect behavior, leading to inefficiency and undermining societal morality. He also asserts that countries with more pronounced equality, such as Asian countries, outperform countries with high levels of inequality, such as those in Latin America. Bowles has also served as an economic advisor to the governments of Cuba, South Africa, and Greece. He has worked on the presidential campaigns of Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson and provided consultation to the Congress of South African Trade Unions and President Nelson Mandela.