Rankings / Candidate
Samuel Bowles
Santa Fe Institute · Behavioral
Photo: MeJudice, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Currently #11, tier Field, score 14.3, named by 1 source.Score history: 100.0, 25.0, 14.3
The work. Fifty years arguing that people are not textbook selfish calculators. Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), with Gintis, and The Moral Economy (2016) showed incentives can crowd out the cooperation they were meant to buy.
The case for. Behavioral economics has been rewarded twice, but never for the strand that treats preferences as something institutions shape.
The case against. Born in 1939, lifelong co-author Herbert Gintis died in 2023, and a Marxist turned complexity theorist is a hard citation for Stockholm to write.
The KmikeyM angle. Bowles's crowding out result is the live risk of the whole experiment: pay people to care about your life and you may end up with people who only care about the dividend.
What the sources say
- Clarivate alumni (prior years) named Samuel Bowles: named in 2022: for providing evidence and models that broaden our understanding of economic behavior (heat 100) Preseason: the Clarivate alumni pool