Herbert Gintis
Biographic Data
| ID | 204908 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Herbert Gintis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Herbert |
| FAMILY NAME | Gintis |
| SIGNATURE | GINTIS H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Santa Fe Institute |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 79 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1203 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Democracy and Capitalism
“Democratic capitalism” suggests a set of harmonious and mutually supportive institutions, each promoting a kind of freedom in distinct realms of social life. This chapter shows that capitalism and democracy are not complementary systems. Rather they are sharply contrasting rules regulating both the process of human development and the historical evolution of whole societies: the one is characterized by the preeminence of economic privilege based…
Paul, Robert A. 2015. Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Society
Article Paul, Robert A. 2015. Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Society. was published on April 1, 2017 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 1, issue 1)
How humans cooperate and punish
Individuality and Entanglement: The Moral and Material Bases of Social Life
Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems
We provide the most up-to-date evidence available in various behavioral fields in support of the hypothesis that the emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line-together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive as well as cultural innovation in the form of fire and cooking-created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return for coordinated, cooperative scavenging and h…
The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences
Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences—from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as this book demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. The book shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, s…
The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences - Revised Edition
Game theory cannot fully explain human behaviour and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. Gintis shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a handicapped enterprise.
Price dynamics, financial fragility and aggregate volatility
Stochastic stability in the Scarf economy
The Evolutionary Basis of Collective Action
This article discusses two problems in the study of political behaviours that support collective action. It reviews recent behavioural experiments documenting the variety and extent of these so called social preferences, as well as the manner in which the existence of individuals — even a minority — can affect group behaviour dramatically. This article shows that repeated interactions and kin-based altruism do not provide an adequate account of t…
Explaining altruistic behaviour in humans
This article presents evidence supporting strong reciprocity. It explains why, under conditions plausibly characteristic of the early stages of human evolution, a small fraction of strong reciprocators could invade a population of self-regarding types, and why strong reciprocity is an evolutionarily stable strategy. It uses the term ‘self-regarding’ rather than the more common term ‘self-interested’ to avoid the question as to whether it is selfi…
Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought
Networking Past and Present
A special feature in the Social Evolution Forum with R.I.M. Dunbar as the author of the focus article. Commentaries by Nicolas Baumard, Marcus J. Hamilton, Paul Hooper, Daniel N. Finkel, and Herbert Gintis
The Evolution of Human Cooperation
The study of human cooperation today
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. This book shows that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolu…
Schooling in capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
""This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm. Contemporary Sociology. No book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators. Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University …
A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution
A fascinating look at the evolutionary origins of cooperation Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. In A Cooperative Species , Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis—p…
The future of behavioral game theory
Social norms as choreography
This article shows that social norms are better explained as correlating devices for a correlated equilibrium of the underlying stage game, rather than Nash equilibria. Whereas the epistemological requirements for rational agents playing Nash equilibria are very stringent and usually implausible, the requirements for a correlated equilibrium amount to the existence of common priors, which we interpret as induced by the cultural system of the soci…
Rationality and common knowledge
A central finding in interactive epistemology is that rational agents implement Nash equilibria when there is a commonality of knowledge in the form of common priors and common knowledge of key aspects of the strategic interaction. Epistemic game theory, however, fails to articulate the general conditions of knowledge sharing. This paper makes explicit the fundamental epistemological assumptions behind knowledge sharing
The Evolutionary Basis of Collective Action
This article discusses two problems in the study of political behaviours that support collective action. It reviews recent behavioural experiments documenting the variety and extent of these so called social preferences, as well as the manner in which the existence of individuals — even a minority — can affect group behaviour dramatically. This article shows that repeated interactions and kin-based altruism do not provide an adequate account of t…
Unequal Chances: Family Background and Economic Success
L'idéal d'égalité appartient-il au passé: Homo reciprocans versus Homo œconomicus
Pour comprendre le triste état des politiques égalitaires aujourd'hui, il faut remettre en cause l'Homo œconomicus, le modèle économique de l'égoïste impénitent aux tendances asociales qui a servi de point de départ à tous les débats politiques depuis Thomas Hobbes jusqu'à la discussion actuelle sur la réforme de l'État-providence. Néanmoins l'État-providence n'est pas en crise parce que l'égoïsme serait omniprésent. Les expériences et les enquêt…
Strong Reciprocity and the Roots of Human Morality
A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences
The various behavioral disciplines model human behavior in distinct and incompatible ways. Yet, recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for rendering coherent the areas of overlap of the various behavioral disciplines. The analytical tools deployed in this task incorporate core principles from several behavioral disciplines. The proposed framework recognizes evolutionary theory, covering both genetic and cultural…
Schooling in capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
""This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm. Contemporary Sociology. No book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators. Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University …
Explaining altruistic behavior in humans
Human Motivation and Social Cooperation: Experimental and Analytical Foundations
Since Durkheim, sociological explanations of social cooperation have emphasized the internalization of values that induce norm compliance. Since Adam Smith, economic explanations of social cooperation have emphasized incentives that induce selfish individuals to cooperate. Here, we develop a general approach-the Beliefs, Preferences, and Constraints approach-showing that each of the above models is a special case. Our approach is based on evidenc…
Social Capital and Community Governance
Social capital generally refers to trust, concern for ones associates, a willingness to live by the norms of one's community and to punish those who do not. While essential to good governance, these behaviors and dispositions appear to conflict with the fundamental behavioral assumptions of economics whose archetypal individual---Homo economicus---is entirely self-regarding
Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited
Recent research has entirely vindicated the authors' once-controversial estimates of high levels of intergenerational persistence of economic status, the unimportance of the heritability of IQ in this process, and the fact that the contribution of schooling to cognitive development plays little part in explaining why those with more schooling have higher earnings. Additional research has supported the authors' hypotheses concerning the role of pe…
The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States
The Inheritance of Inequality
How level is the intergenerational playing field? What are the causal mechanisms that underlie the intergenerational transmission of economic status? Are these mechanisms amenable to public policies in a way that would make the attainment of economic success more fair? These are the questions we will try to answer
Contested Exchange: New Microfoundations for the Political Economy of Capitalism
The Revenge of Homo Economicus: Contested Exchange and the Revival of Political Economy
Recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the self-interested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but Utopian world in which conflicts abound but a handshake is a handshake. But a handshake is not always a handshake. Studies of principal-agent analysis, the economics of information, radical political economy, mechanism design, and transactions cost economics have a…
Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems
We provide the most up-to-date evidence available in various behavioral fields in support of the hypothesis that the emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line-together with environmental developments that made a diet of meat from large animals adaptive as well as cultural innovation in the form of fire and cooking-created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return for coordinated, cooperative scavenging and h…
Solving the Puzzle of Prosociality
Homo sapiens is the only species in which we observe extensive cooperation among large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals. Incompatible approaches to explaining cooperation among humans have been offered by sociologists, biologists, and economists. None is wholly successful. Each discipline, moreover, has ignored basic insights of the others. This article explains cooperation by combining central contributions of these disciplines, deve…
Efficient Redistribution: New Rules for Markets, States, and Communities
Social norms as choreography
This article shows that social norms are better explained as correlating devices for a correlated equilibrium of the underlying stage game, rather than Nash equilibria. Whereas the epistemological requirements for rational agents playing Nash equilibria are very stringent and usually implausible, the requirements for a correlated equilibrium amount to the existence of common priors, which we interpret as induced by the cultural system of the soci…
Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life
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. Presenting an overview of research in economics, anthropology, evolutionary and human biology, social psychology, and sociology, the book deals with both the theo…
Strong Reciprocity and the Roots of Human Morality
Behavioral ethics meets natural justice
Binmore's Natural Justiceoffers an evolutionary approach to morality, in which moral rules form a cultural system that is robust and evolutionarily stable. The folk theorem is the analytical basis for his theory of justice. I argue that this is a mistake, as the equilibria described by the folk theorem lack dynamic stability in games with several players. While the dependence of Binmore's argument on the folk theorem is more tactical than strateg…
The Long Shadow of Work: Education, the Family, and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor
Every child born into the world should be looked upon by society as so much raw material
The Dynamics of General Equilibrium
The Walrasian general equilibrium model is the centrepiece of modern economic theory, but progress in understanding its dynamical properties has been meagre. This article shows that the instability of Walras' tâtonnement process is due to the public nature of prices, which leads to excessive correlation in the behaviour of economic agents. When prices are private information, a dynamic with a globally stable stationary state obtains in economies …
Towards the Unity of the Human Behavioral Sciences
Despite their distinct objects of study, the human behavioral sciences all include models of individual human behavior. Unity in the behavioral sciences requires that there be a common underlying model of individual human behavior, specialized and enriched to meet the particular needs of each discipline. Such unity does not exist, and cannot be easily attained, since the various disciplines have incompatible models and disparate research methodol…
International capital markets and national economic policy
This paper provides an alternative to the two prevalent models of the linkage between domestic macroeconomic policy and the international economy in the face of the recent growth of global financial markets. The first, the ‘insular’ model, suggests that countries retain virtually total control over their economic destinies. The second, the global neo‐classical model, suggests that international markets deprive national economies of the instrument…
Standing on the Shoulders of Bowles and Gintis: Class Formation and Capitalist Schools
In The German Ideology, Marx articulates one of his most famous claims. Paraphrased, it reads in essence that ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid While there have been interpreters of this point who have chosen to see this process as a conscious conspiracy, for Marx it was considerably more complicated. For him, out of the constitutive conflicts and contradictions of …
Democracy & Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought
The Evolution of Human Cooperation
The study of human cooperation today
The future of behavioral game theory
Rationality and common knowledge
A central finding in interactive epistemology is that rational agents implement Nash equilibria when there is a commonality of knowledge in the form of common priors and common knowledge of key aspects of the strategic interaction. Epistemic game theory, however, fails to articulate the general conditions of knowledge sharing. This paper makes explicit the fundamental epistemological assumptions behind knowledge sharing
Alienation and Power
A Radical Analysis of Welfare Economics and Individual Development
I. On individual welfare, 574. — II. An overview critique, 576. — III. The generalized production possibilities set, 579. — IV. Functional imperatives and individual development, 580. — V. Structural operation: Associative, cybernetic, and institutional patterning, 584. — VI. Recapitulation, 587. — VII. Work, 590. —VIII. Technology, 591. — IX. Education, 592. — X. Consumer sovereignty, 594. — XI. Conclusion, 595.
Towards a Political Economy of Education: A Radical Critique of Ivan Illich 's Deschooling Society
The author critiques Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, arguing that, despite his forthright vision of the liberating potential of educational technology, Illich fails to understand fully how the existing educational system serves the capitalist economy. Gintis evaluates and rejects the book's major thesis that the present character of schooling stems from the economy's need to shape consumer demands and expectations. Instead, he offers a product…
Activism and Counter-Culture: The Dialectics of Consciousness in the Corporate State
My remarks start from the progessive disintegration of American society. The halcyon days of ‘green pastures’ consumer capitalism — a brief flurry following World War II — strike us now as a hollow and ironic delusion. There will be no more Whistling in the Dark with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. American society is falling apart. The progressive leitmotif is riot and dropping out. Kids still putter around in the garage these days - not with th…
The Limits of Sociology
Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America
The Long Shadow of Work: Education, the Family, and the Reproduction of the Social Division of Labor
Every child born into the world should be looked upon by society as so much raw material
The Nature of Labor Exchange and the Theory of Capitalist Production
This article compares the neoclassical and Marxian theories of the firm. The neoclassical, interpreting the social relations in the production process, in particular the relations of authority and inequality, as flowing from the nature of technology and atomistic preferences, is shown to be incorrect. The Marxian theory which interprets the social relations of the production process as the outcome of class struggle, is supported theoretically and…
The Marxian theory of value and heterogeneous labour: A critique and reformulation
Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis; The Marxian theory of value and heterogeneous labour: a critique and reformulation, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 1
Professor Morishima on heterogeneous labour and Marxian value theory
In our paper, 'The Marxian theory of value and heterogeneous labour' (1977), we have shown that the heterogeneity of the labour force in capitalist society is a necessary and integral aspect of the reproduction of capitalism. Hence the assumption of the reduci bility of heterogeneous labour to common labour is fatal to the labour theory of value. However, we have also shown that this reduction is unnecessary, and indeed in many cases occludes our…
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
The American Occupational Structure Eleven Years Later
Labour heterogeneity and the labour theory of value: A reply
Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis; Labour heterogeneity and the labour theory of value: a reply, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Volume 5, Issue 3, 1 September
Education as a Site of Contradictions in the Reproduction of the Capital-Labor Relationship: Second Thoughts on the 'Correspondence Principle'
This paper deals with the treatment of the contradictory articulation of the educational system and the economic system in the liberal democratic capitalist social formation. It serves as an emmendation to our book Schooling in Capitalist Almierica (Basic Books, 1976).
Structure and Practice in the Labor Theory of Value
The Marxian labor theory of value has been criticized in recent years by neoclassical and Sraffian economists as superfluous to the analysis of capitalist economies. It is argued in this paper the usual presentations and de fenses of the labor theory of value are indeed faulty, but the theory itself is never theless indispensable. We develop a defense of the labor theory of value based on the proposition that both labor and labor-power fail to re…
The Crisis of Liberal Democratic Capitalism: The Case of the United States
Towards a Post-Marxist Radical Social Theory
Standing on the Shoulders of Bowles and Gintis: Class Formation and Capitalist Schools
In The German Ideology, Marx articulates one of his most famous claims. Paraphrased, it reads in essence that ruling class will give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only rational universally valid While there have been interpreters of this point who have chosen to see this process as a conscious conspiracy, for Marx it was considerably more complicated. For him, out of the constitutive conflicts and contradictions of …
Democracy & Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought
Rethinking Marxism and Liberalism from a Radical Democratic Perspective
Reply to Our Critics
Contested Exchange: New Microfoundations for the Political Economy of Capitalism
Markets and democracy: Participation, accountability and efficiency
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. The contributors bring contemporary microeconomic theory to bear on a range of related issues, including the relationship between democratic firm…
The Revenge of Homo Economicus: Contested Exchange and the Revival of Political Economy
Recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the self-interested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but Utopian world in which conflicts abound but a handshake is a handshake. But a handshake is not always a handshake. Studies of principal-agent analysis, the economics of information, radical political economy, mechanism design, and transactions cost economics have a…
International capital markets and national economic policy
This paper provides an alternative to the two prevalent models of the linkage between domestic macroeconomic policy and the international economy in the face of the recent growth of global financial markets. The first, the ‘insular’ model, suggests that countries retain virtually total control over their economic destinies. The second, the global neo‐classical model, suggests that international markets deprive national economies of the instrument…
Economics (54 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Political science (41 works) · Law (32 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (26 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (25 works) · Politics (24 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (22 works) · Microeconomics (21 works)