Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2004.

Abstract

Microeconomics is not necessarily Walrasian economics, and it can be developed on the basis of evolutionary social science with the classical economists’ interest in the wealth and poverty of nations and people. Samuel Bowles impressively shows us an evolutionary approach to microeconomics in his book, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2004. As he mentions, “the book is intended for use in graduate-level microeconomics courses, as well as courses in institutional and evolutionary economics and formal modeling courses in sociology, anthropology, and political sciences” (p.ix). Readers must see that the theoretical development of evolutionary and institutional economics is realized with such analytical techniques as evolutionary game theory , agent-based model, and multi-level selection model. Samuel Bowles has been one of the most influential American radical economists since the 1970s. He studied the education system in the US with Herbert Gintis in the 1970s. In the 1980s, he was engaged in the study of “the social structures of accumulation” in the post-war US economy with David Gordon and Thomas Weisskopf, and published an epoch-making book, Beyond the Waste Land (Bowles, S. Gordon, D., and Weisskopf, T. (1983)), which proposed a democratic alternative to economic decline. Then, he started to develop “the post-W alrasian political economy” with his seminal article, “The production process in a competitive economy: Walrasian, neo-Hobbsian, and Marxian models” (Bowles (1985)). In this new approach, he constructed the