History matters: on the mystifying appeal of Bowles and Gintis

Abstract

Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis have made a broad and sustained contribution to many areas of contemporary economic thought and policy discussions, centring on human interactions in economic settings. Since the mid-1980s, their work, collectively and individually, has developed from a concern with contested exchanges to analyses of behavioural repertoires pursued through evolutionary game theory in which they claim that 'history matters'. Despite their alignment with the mainstream they retain an appeal to some heterodox economists. We argue that this appeal is misplaced. Their theoretical work and knowledge claims rest on methodological individualism and equilibrium reasoning, which fosters an obtuse reductionism. They present a confused methodology, which seems to be motivated by a desire to remain coherent to standard economics. We show how their acceptance of methodological individualism and ergodic modelling undermines their knowledge claims as well as their declaration that history matters in their analysis.

Veblen’s evolutionary methodology and its implications for heterodox economics in the calculable future

“…Instead, new institutional economics (e.g., Williamson and North), new evolutionary economics (e.g., Nelson and Winter), and evolutionary game theory (e.g., John Maynard Smith, Bowles and Gintis) that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s fall into Veblen's 'neoclassical' economics in the sense that they, like Marshall's economics, bear an "air of evolutionism." In other words, above-mentioned approaches are "quasievolutionary" or quasi-institutional economics which presumes normality and fixity of the system in which transformative social agency and its reciprocal-cumulative relationship with social institutions are replaced by optimizing individuals (Veblen [1900(Veblen [ ] 1961dVeblen [1898Dugger 1995;Finch and McMaster 2018;Fine 2019;Jo 2019b). For example, in Nelson and Winter (1982), the evolutionary process becomes artificial dynamics as expressed in the probabilistic Markov process and the simulation experiment in which purposeful human actions play no role.…”

The role of regulation in constituting markets: a co-evolutionary perspective on the UK television production sector

“…The behavioural routines on the basis of these representations feed back into the environment which, with time, will influence individual preferences and beliefs. This perspective implies a break from the individual-centred view that infuses most game theory, since it recognizes the social embeddedness of the individual (Finch and McMaster, 2017). Although this sociobiological perspective may uncover the relevance of common traits and cues that are genetically and socially encoded for human coordination and cooperation, its use requires caution when applied to the study of formal rules that are diverse and change rapidly across contemporary legal systems (Deakin, 2011).…”