Image

UMass Amherst alumnus Suresh Naidu, the Jack Wang and Echo Ren Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University, will deliver the eighth annual Sam Bowles Lecture on Thursday, Nov. 14 at 4 p.m. on the Third Floor of Gordon Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow. Those who are unable to attend in person are invited to participate via Zoom.

The lecture, presented by the Department of Economics, honors longtime faculty member Sam Bowles, emeritus professor of economics, for his contributions to the department and the discipline.

Naidu’s talk, “The Evidence-based Path to Mostly Automated Socialism,” will examine the goals of economic planning as envisioned by 20^th century socialist economists. He asserts that while these goals have largely been achieved in social democracies where government shares of gross domestic product often exceed capital shares, a new set of economic governance tools is possible – and necessary – thanks to administrative data, living deep learning models and algorithmic policies set by both business and governments.

Image

Naidu is an expert in political economy and historical labor markets. His research interests include the economic effects of democracy and non-democracy, monopsony in labor markets, the economics of American slavery, guest worker migration, and labor unions and organizing. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty in 2010, Naidu served as a Harvard Academy fellow from 2008 to 2010. He is also external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of the Columbia Center on Political Economy. Naidu holds a doctorate in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s degree in economics from UMass Amherst and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Waterloo.

Bowles is one the founders of the heterodox economics program at UMass Amherst and is considered one of the most important contemporary figures in offering comprehensive explanations of why humans are prosocial, and cooperation can emerge in societies. He continues to contribute to the department by teaching a popular foundational microeconomics graduate course. He is also the Arthur Spiegel Research Professor and director of the Behavioral Sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute and emeritus faculty at Siena University in Italy.

Past Bowles lectures are archived on the Department of Economics website.