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 and microeconomics. However, by the late 1960s, Bowles had already formed friendships with numerous leftist, radical economists such as Arthur MacEwan, Thomas Weisskopf, and Herbert Gintis. In 1968 he became a founding member of the Union for Radical Political Economics. As explained in the Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, Bowles and his contemporaries sought a new economic paradigm that "could illuminate rather than ignore or obfuscate our political concerns with racism, sexism, imperialism, injustice and the alienation of labour. Not surprisingly, Marxism was an important intellectual guidepost in this quest."
In 1971 Bowles was hired as an associate professor of economics at Harvard University. However, his time at Harvard as a faculty member was fairly tumultuous. Deeply involved in the protest against the United States' involvement in Vietnam and already collaborating with fellow radical economist Gintis, Bowles came into conflict at Harvard as a new professor when he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. He was fired, but successfully pursued legal action to overturn both the dismissal and the oath requirement. However, when he was denied tenure in 1973, Bowles left Harvard for the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst, where he was the chair of the Department of Economics by the year 2000.
The first published paper reflecting Bowles's Marxist approach to economics appeared as "Schooling and Inequality from Generation to Generation" in the May/June issue of Journal of Political Economy. With the publication of Schooling of Capitalist America, (1976) cowritten with Gintis, Bowles's rejection of orthodox economics was complete. In this work, Bowles and Gintis explored the relationship between capitalism and the educational system. In so doing, they coined the term "corresponding principle," suggesting that school systems tend to adopt a hierarchical structure that mirrors the structure found in the labor market of a capitalist economy. Using this principle, they critiqued liberal educational philosophy, coming to the conclusion that educational reform is incompatible with a capitalist society.
After publishing Schooling in Capitalist America,) Bowles collaborated with David Gordon and Weisskopf to study the stagnation of the U.S. economy of the late 1970s and the ensuing escalation of rightist political economic policy. The result was a series of papers calling for a left-social democratic policy. The papers were subsequently published in two volumes as Beyond the Waste Land (1983) and After the Waste Land (1991). Bowles also continued his work with Gintis, and in 1986 they published Democracy and Capitalism. In this work, they critiqued the theoretical, historical, and contemporary connections between democracy and capitalism.
During the remainder of the 1980s and in the 1990s, Bowles continued his study of capitalism from a Marxist perspective, concluding in such papers as "Contested Exchange" (1990) and "The Democratic Firm" (1992) that a capitalist economic system is both undemocratic and inefficient. His other projects include Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Markets, States, and Communities (co-author, 1999), Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change (co-author, 2000), and Economic Institutions and Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach to Microeconomics, scheduled for publication in 2001.
In 2000, Bowles taught courses at UMass in microeconomics and the theory of institutions. He was also a research associate of the Santa Fe Institute and co-chair of the research network on the effects of inequality on economic performance. He was appointed by South African President Nelson Mandela to serve as a member of South Africa's Commission on the Labour Market and assist in designing economic policies to overcome the effects of apartheid.
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