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Samuel Bowles

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Samuel Bowles

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Also known as Samuel Stebbins Bowles

American economist

Person · Open Library

Born
1939
Works
49

Top works

  • Unequal chances
  • A cooperative species
  • Schooling in Capitalist America
  • Recasting egalitarianism
  • Cooperative Species

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
United States
Active from
1939

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
7
Total plays
48

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Samuel+Bowles">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Samuel Bowles

Quotes

  • The view that early humans lived in worlds with little contact outside one's family--Dawkins' ideal conditions for self-interested cooperation to flourish--is difficult to square with what is known about the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophers, Dawkins, Huxley, and other biologists seem to have jumped on a faulty time machine, and have journeyed to an imaginary ancestral world.
  • Endangered liberal values would stand a better chance in a society committed to defending the weak and vulnerable, as did the early liberals, and to insuring people against the economic insecurities that inevitably accompany a technologically dynamic and cosmopolitan economy.
  • The point of Darwin's statement is clear: in competitions among groups, those whose members have learned how to cooperate—that is, not to compete with one another—often win. Think of team sports. Darwin spoke of tribes as groups that would benefit from having a preponderance of cooperative members. The same reasoning applies to firms, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and nations.
  • The first dimension is called "competition," and it refers to that aspect of an economic system in which exchanges of one sort or another play the most important part. In capitalism, of course, competition and exchange occur primarily in markets.
  • The second dimension is called "command," and it refers to those aspects of economic relationships that involve power, coercion, hierarchy, subordination, or authority. In capitalist (and many other) societies, command is a central aspect of the workplace, the household, and the government. It concerns relations among nations, classes, races, men, women, and other groups in society as well.
  • The third dimension of three-dimensional economics, change, suggests that studying economics also means studying history. The process of change in society cannot be understood without considering the past and how it changed, eventually becoming the present. Change in political economy may be contrasted with the static approach of conventional economics that freezes time at a moment.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA