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In Episode 18 of Hidden Forces, host Demetri Kofinas speaks with Samuel Bowles, about economic man and the moral economy, exploring some of the latest insights from the field of behavioral economics. The two also explore how incentives and prices convey information and shape perceptions of value in the economy. Dr. Bowles is a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he heads the Behavioral Sciences Program. His studies on cultural and genetic evolution have challenged the conventional economic assumptions of an economic man motivated entirely by self-interest. The author of nearly twenty books, Samuel Bowles has most recently written The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens and A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. He has also served as an economic advisor to the governments of Cuba, South Africa, and Greece, to the U.S presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson, as well as to the late Nelson Mandela. Bowles' is now engaged in studying the theoretical and empirical evolution of political hierarchy and wealth inequality over the long run.

In this conversation, we follow the archeological record of economic man. We pursue the path towards rational expectations and utility maximization. We take the road from Aristotle, paying heed to his ethics, and to his conviction that the test of a good constitution, is a good citizenry. But, with the collapse of Rome and Europe’s descent into darkness emerges this idea of life as brutish and man as wicked. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Niccolò Machiavelli's Prince, were written to appeal to the lowest, most unimpressive motives of man's animal nature. Later, political economists like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith would take this notion a step further. They sought to harness the industries of avarice, converting man's self-interest towards the public good. The invisible hand emerges, and with it, notions of separability. Homo Sapien existed in one realm, and economic man, in another. The beneficent, moral being on the one hand, and the selfish, utility maximizing agent on the other. Laws were built upon this framework. Ideas of the market place were developed. Incentives and regulations were crafted, in what economists call Mechanism Design. What have we learned in the years since that have challenged the foundations of these neoclassical assumptions of rational expectations and utility maximization? What are some of the insights of behavioral economists, moral philosophers, and evolutionary psychologists that task the fitness of economic man? What types of system can we design that is better suited towards the citizens of Aristotle’s legislator than to the aberrations of modern economic man?

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