Sam Bowles Lecture

New Sam Bowles Lecture! 

"The Consequences and the Future of Inequality: A Continuing Conversation with Sam Bowles," Presented by Pranab Bardhan, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, 9/24 | 4:00 PM | Gordon Hall 3rd Floor with Reception to Follow

 
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Professor Bardhan was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University, England. He had been at the faculty of MIT, Indian Statistical Institute, and Delhi School of Economics before joining Berkeley. Professor Bardhan has been a Visiting Professor/Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and London School of Economics. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Siena Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9, and was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011.

Professor Bardhan has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. Bardhan was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003, and co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982 and the C.R.Rao Centenary Gold Medal by the Indian Econometric Society in 2025.

Professor Bardhan the author of 18 books, editor of 14 other books, and author of more than 150 journal articles. His most recent two books for a general readership are: A World of Insecurity (Harvard University Press, 2022) and Charaiveti: An Academic's Global Journey (Harper Collins India, 2024). He recently started a new substack where he writes on contemporary issues in politics, economics and culture, accessible at pranabbardhan.substack.com

For more details about Professor Bardhan’s lectures and publications, visit https://eml.berkeley.edu/~webfac/bardhan/bardhan.htm.

 

 

About the Sam Bowles Lecture Series

 

Samuel Bowles (PhD, Economics, Harvard University) is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He taught economics first at Harvard and since then at the University of Massachusetts as well as the University of Siena. His studies on cultural and genetic evolution have challenged the conventional economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by self-interest. Recent work has also explored how organizations, communities and nations could be better governed in light of the fact that altruistic and ethical motives are common in most populations. He is now engaged in theoretical and empirical studies of political hierarchy and wealth inequality and their evolution over the very long run. 

His scholarly papers have appeared in Science, Nature, New Scientist, American Economic Review, Theoretical Population Biology, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Econometrica, Antiquity, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Behavioral and Brain Science, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Harvard Business Review and Current Anthropology. 

His recent books include The Moral Economy: Why good laws are no substitute for good citizens (Yale University Press, 2016), A Cooperative Species: Human reciprocity and its evolution (with Herbert Gintis, Princeton University Press, 2011), a new intermediate level undergraduate textbook, Microeconomics: Competition, Conflict, and Coordination (with Simon Halliday, Oxford University Press 2022), and Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems and Solutions in Microeconomics (with Weikai Chen, Open Books, 2025). With CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources for Economics) he has developed two new free online introductory e-textbooks and instructional materials, The Economy, and Economy, Society, and Public Policy, for majors and non-majors, respectively (www.core-econ.org).

He has also served as an economic advisor to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and President Nelson Mandela, to the governments of Cuba, South Africa and Greece, the Legislature of the State of New Mexico, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, and the Pontifical Academy of Science (Rome).

 
 
 

Past Lectures

Inaugural Lecture, 2015-16
Samuel Bowles
 
2nd Annual Lecture, 2016-2017
Manuel Pastor
Equity, Growth, and Community
 
 
4th Annual Lecture, 2018-2019
 
5th Annual Lecture
 
6th Annual Lecture
Juan Camilo Cardenas, 2021-2022
 
7th Annual Lecture
James Heintz, 2022-2023
Social Justice, Alternatives, and UMass Economics: Normative Propositions for Collective Deliberation”
 
8th Annual Lecture
Suresh Naidu, 2024-2025
The Evidence-based Path to Mostly Automated Socialism
 
9th Annual Lecture
Wendy Carlin, 2025-2026
 
Wendy Carlin is Professor of Economics at University College London (UCL), Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.  She leads an international project - the CORE Econ project - to reform the undergraduate economics curriculum and is co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Centre on Wealth Concentration, Inequality and the Economy. The CORE project produces open-access e-books used in universities around the world. Her research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, the economics of transition, and economic knowledge and education. She is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the UK's Office for Budget Responsibility.  She has co-authored with David Soskice four macroeconomics books: Macroeconomics and the Wage Bargain (OUP, 1990), Macroeconomics: Imperfections, Institutions and Policies (OUP, 2006) and Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System (OUP, 2015). The third book integrates the financial system into the macroeconomic model to allow for analysis of financial cycles as well as business cycles and growth. The fourth (2024) is titled Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and Inequality. It brings to the fore how inequality can be incorporated in macroeconomic modelling of business cycles, financial instability, and growth in a unified way. 
In 2015, she was awarded a CBE for services to economics and public finance, in 2022 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2023 as Fellow of the British Academy. She is Vice President of the International Economic Association.
 
This lecture has emerged from a growing concern that the presenter has had for the last few years and after more than two decades of running experiments in the lab and the field: why is it that if humans have the capacity of being prosocial in their behavior, kind to others, and are willing to make costly efforts to preserve the environment or reduce inequality to achieve fairness, we do not see promising trends in terms of the urgent planetary goals of preserving nature and its capacity to sustain society, or goals of reducing the undesirable high levels of inequality and fairness?