Sam Bowles

Sam’s scientific curiosity and passion has led him to explore three broad themes:

• The long-term evolution of societal institutions, including property rights and forms of cooperation, with attention to the effects on economic and political inequality.
• The coevolution of societal institutions and individual behaviors (and the values motivating them), focusing on the genetic and cultural evolution of ethical and other-regarding preferences.
• The creation and propagation of a new paradigm in economics to transform what students learn and how citizens think and talk about the economy and its evolving place in the biosphere.

His experiments, theoretical contributions, and other studies have challenged the conventional economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by self-interest. He has gone on to explore how organizations, communities, and nations could be better governed, taking account of the fact that altruistic and ethical motives as well as self-interest are common in most populations. He also believes that better understanding the prehistoric origins of enduring wealth disparities that  resulted from changes in farming technology, property rights, and political systems may provide insights on the future of societal inequalities and policies to mitigate them.

Sam’s research draws on insights from archaeology, anthropology, biology, psychology, and economics. It is methodologically eclectic, using stochastic Markov-process modeling techniques, machine learning, models of network structure, methods from population genetics, behavioral experiments, agent-based modeling, conventional archaeological practices, and multi-level selection models from biology. His work on the joint dynamics of societal-level change and individual development constitutes a rejection of methodological individualism (as it is termed in the social sciences) and analogous reductionist methods throughout the sciences.