Samuel Bowles was born in 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up in rural New England and lived in India with his parents in the early 1950s. In 1958 he ventured on a two-year tour of Russia as a musician--albeit not a very good one by his own account. He also spent three years in Nigeria, employed by the government of Northern Nigeria as a high school teacher. In 1960 he received a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University, during which time he became actively involved in the civil rights movement. In 1965 he earned his doctor of philosophy degree in economics from Harvard University.

Bowles's first book was published in 1969 as Planning Educational Systems for Economic Growth, a revised version of his doctoral thesis. In 1970 he published Notes and Problems in Microeconomic Theory, with D. Kendrick. Both publications were based on the dominant neoclassical understanding of economics of education...