Product Description: Originally published in 1986, Bowles and Gintis present a critique of contemporary Marxian and liberal political theory. They show that 'capitalism' and 'democracy' - although widely held jointly to characterize Western society - are sharply contrasting systems regulating both the process of human developement and the historical evolution of whole societies...read more

Product Description: Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Product Description: The market does not spontaneously generate democratic or participatory economic institutions. This book asks whether a modern, efficient economy can be rendered democratically accountable and, if so, what strategic changes might be required to regulate the market-mediated interaction of economic agents...read more

In this novel introduction to modern microeconomic theory, Samuel Bowles returns to the classical economists' interest in the wealth and poverty of nations and people, the workings of the institutions of capitalist economies, and the coevolution of individual preferences and the structures of markets, firms, and other institutions. Using recent advances in evolutionary game theory, contract theory, behavioral experiments, and the modeling of dynamic processes, he develops a theory of how economic institutions shape individual behavior, and how institutions evolve due to individual actions, technological change, and chance events. Topics addressed include institutional innovation, social preferences, nonmarket social interactions, social capital, equilibrium unemployment, credit constraints, economic power, generalized increasing returns, disequilibrium outcomes, and path dependency.Each chapter is introduced by empirical puzzles or historical episodes illuminated by the modeling that follows, and the book closes with sets of problems to be solved by readers seeking to improve their mathematical modeling skills. Complementing standard mathematical analysis are agent-based computer simulations of complex evolving systems that are available online so that readers can experiment with the models. Bowles concludes with the time-honored challenge of "getting the rules right," providing an evaluation of markets, states, and communities as contrasting and yet sometimes synergistic structures of governance. Must reading for students and scholars not only in economics but across the behavioral sciences, this engagingly written and compelling exposition of the new microeconomics moves the field beyond the conventional models of prices and markets toward a more accurate and policy-relevant portrayal of human social behavior.

Product Description: Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers...read more

Product Description: Is the United States "the land of equal opportunity" or is the playing field tilted in favor of those whose parents are wealthy, well educated, and white? If family background is important in getting ahead, why? And if the processes that transmit economic status from parent to child are unfair, could public policy address the problem? Unequal Chances provides new answers to these questions by leading economists, sociologists, biologists, behavioral geneticists, and philosophers...read more

Product Description: This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

Product Description: Would improving the economic, social, and political condition of the world's disadvantaged people slow--or accelerate--environmental degradation? In Inequality, Cooperation, and Environmental Sustainability, leading social scientists provide answers to this difficult question, using new research on the impact of inequality on environmental sustainability...read more

Product Description: Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of "strong reciprocators" in a social group...read more

Product Description: Much popular belief--and public policy--rests on the idea that those born into poverty have it in their power to escape. But the persistence of poverty and ever-growing economic inequality around the world have led many economists to seriously question the model of individual economic self-determination when it comes to the poor...read more

Product Description: Can the welfare state survive in an economically integrated world? Many have argued that globalization has undermined national policies to raise the living standards and enhance the economic opportunities of the poor. This book, by sixteen of the world's leading authorities in international economics and the welfare state, suggests a surprisingly different set of consequences: Globalization does not preclude social insurance and egalitarian redistribution--but it does change the mix of policies that can accomplish these ends...read more

Product Description: Moral Sentiments and Material Interests presents an innovative synthesis of research in different disciplines to argue that cooperation stems not from the stereotypical selfish agent acting out of disguised self-interest but from the presence of "strong reciprocators" in a social group...read more

Product Description: "Understanding Capitalism, 3e" provides an introduction to economics with extensive attention to the global economy, inequality, the information revolution, the exercise of power and the historical evolution of economic institutions and individual preferences...read more

Product Description: 1865. Bowles, the Editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican recounts his travels as a journalist with Colfax across the Continental U.S. in a series of letters and supplementary papers. Partial Contents: From Massachusetts to the Missouri; From the Missouri to the Platte; Through the Plains to the Rocky Mountains; The Rocky Mountains and Their Gold Mines; Of Persons, Not Things; Mormon Materialities; The Polygamy Question; The Silver Mines of Nevada; The Yosemite Valley and the Big Trees; Mining in California: Its Varieties, Results and Prospects; and The Voyage Home by Steamship and the Isthmus...read more

Product Description: This path-breaking book addresses the nature of human sociality. By bringing together experimental and ethnographic data from fifteen different tribal societies, the contributors are able to explore the universality of human motives in economic decision-making, and the importance of social, institutional and cultural factors, in a manner that has been extremely rare in the social sciences...read more

Product Description: Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal--either voluntary or inherited--rather than systemic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal -- either voluntary or inherited -- rather than systemic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This edited collection looks at the emerging relationship between politics and economics. The analysis of power relations - traditionally the focus of political science - is becoming increasingly important to economists in order to understand concepts such as the 'contested nature' of market exchanges...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Two prominent economists lead a debate to redistribute wealth. In Recasting Egalitarianism, part of Verso's Real Utopias series, economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis diagnose the current malaise of the Left as a result of the obsolescence of its traditional economic models...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For use as a core text or as a supplement to principles of economics courses, this text develops an integrated theory of advanced capitalist economy based on an economic model of production and distribution. This theoretical analysis focuses on the profit rate, on how it is determined in goods markets, labour markets and by government policy, and how it in turn affects the economy...read more