My Tribute to Herb Gintis

Abstract

This is a tribute to Professor Herbert Gintis, a highly original social scientist who passed away in January 2023. Professor Gintis—often together with his lifelong friend and colleague Professor Samuel Bowles—authored numerous pathbreaking articles and books that have contributed greatly to our understanding of human behavior under various social, political, and economic conditions.

JEL Classification: B3, B5

Herb Gintis was an absolutely remarkable man—a brilliant economist, social scientist, philosophical thinker, and writer. He was intellectually curious, innovative, and incisive. Indeed, he was a polymath—rare in our era—whose areas of expertise were multiple, including the construction of computers in the early stages of the digital revolution. He hated conventional wisdom, in all its forms, and took pleasure in paradoxes and contradictions. He was something of a contrarian: he enjoyed vigorous argument, and he reveled in exposing faulty reasoning as well as platitudes—wherever they came from.

Herb attended college at the University of Pennsylvania, without ever taking a course in the social sciences. He then enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the Department of Mathematics at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in two years—but with little enthusiasm. What really excited him was organizing in poor communities for social change and participating in the antiwar movement; and he became very interested in Marxism. After a brief period as a shoemaker, he was advised by his Marxist friend Chuck Levenstein that the economy was key to everything. He then checked out the Economics Department at Harvard and decided to enroll in its PhD program. Having mastered the graduate economics curriculum within a few short years, he wrote his dissertation as a critique of the neoclassical notion that preferences are exogenous, arguing that capitalism could not be justified by its ability to satisfy people’s preferences because those preferences are themselves largely created by the capitalist economic system.

When Herb first entered the Harvard PhD program, there were no radical political economists on the faculty. Within a few years, however, Herb found himself among an increasing number of like-minded radical graduate students, as well as one Harvard Assistant (later Associate) Professor who would become his lifetime close friend, academic colleague, and coauthor: Sam Bowles. By the late 1960s, two more radical Assistant Professors—Arthur MacEwan and I—were hired into the Harvard Economics Department. The four of us—together with numerous PhD students, including Rick Edwards, David Gordon, and Michael Reich—participated actively in the establishment of URPE. Soon afterwards, we began to plan for a new undergraduate “general education” course in radical political economy. This course was first offered in 1970; it proved popular and effective at Harvard, and similar courses were developed and taught by URPE members at many other colleges and universities.

In the early years of the RRPE, Herb served on the editorial board and participated actively in URPE conferences, both during the ASSA meetings and at the annual summer gatherings. Herb contributed three seminal articles to the RRPE in the 1970s, which were widely utilized for years by URPE faculty members in their economics courses. Gintis (1970) drew both on Herb’s experience as a community organizer and on his understanding of Marxian dialectics; this article was very much in the tradition of radical Marxism, adapted to conditions of contemporary capitalism. His basic argument was that the economic growth provided by advanced capitalism cannot satisfy people’s real needs, and that the alienating experience of its irrationality will increasingly lead workers of all kinds to demand reorganization of the economy along rational, liberating lines.

Remarkable as it may seem, Herb’s next two RRPE articles drew on ideas he had already raised in chapters of his PhD thesis—though of course the linguistic style could hardly have been more different! In Gintis (1972), he expanded on the ways in which capitalism generated alienation among the vast majority of its workers, and he concluded that only the development of a democratic and community-based counterculture “within the womb of capitalist society” could offer promise of a liberating socialist future. In Gintis (1976), he drew on Marx’s essential insight that labor cannot be considered just a commodity, because there is a fundamental distinction between labor and labor power: labor can be bought and sold, but the labor power expended by a worker depends on how hard and well she or he works, and this generally cannot be enforced by a contract. This understanding was later brought to the attention of the wider economics profession by Joe Stiglitz, who modeled the work process more formally in terms of principal-agent and incomplete contract theory.

After receiving his PhD in 1969, Herb began his academic career with an appointment to the faculty of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. While there, he and Sam Bowles began their lifelong collaboration with the work that led to their first joint book project, Bowles and Gintis (1976). An important theme of this book was an argument that Herb had developed in his PhD thesis, to the effect that the contribution of education to worker earnings was due at least as much to the effects of schooling on personality as to cognitive characteristics imparted by the educational system. In 1973, Herb moved from the Harvard School of Education to the Economics Department faculty. But the very next year each of them, as well as several other dissident economists, were offered tenured appointments at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with the explicit goal of reshaping its Economics Department into a world-class center for radical political economics. In short order this goal was achieved, and the UMass-Amherst Economics Department became—and has remained—the leading radical political economic institution in North America.

In the 1980s, Herb and Sam developed a political and philosophical critique of Marxism. They asserted that Marx’s mistake was to see power as homogeneous and the state as a mere reflection of society, and that it was wrong to reject as bourgeois values the liberal political philosophy based on individual rights. What matters is having the dignity and freedom to pursue the things you want to pursue in life—collectively and individually. Liberal discourse could lead to emancipation when applied to the economy and to the family. The evolution of their thinking was reflected in their second jointly authored book, Bowles and Gintis (1986). In it they criticized both orthodox Marxism and conventional liberalism. They argued that a democratic form of capitalism can work well only under an “accommodation” between capitalist property rights and democratic personal rights. This necessarily requires effective regulation of capital as well as limitation of inequality (especially at the top), in order to assure substantial opportunities for social mobility. They made the case that capitalism and democracy—the economic and political cornerstones of the postwar liberal era—were becoming incompatible in the mid-1980s. There is even more reason to believe that this is true nowadays.

In the 1990s, Herb and Sam turned to the development of non-neoclassical microeconomic models, and they began to employ techniques being utilized increasingly by somewhat more mainstream economists. Game theory could be utilized to analyze the exercise of power in markets with unenforceable contracts. And experimental economics could enable researchers to throw light on how people actually behave under various conditions. Herb and Sam were quite ready to undertake mathematical models of non-general equilibrium exchanges with endogenous enforcement and asymmetric information. Indeed, Herb suggested in an interview that “Sam and I have gotten closer to the profession, and the profession has gotten closer to us.. . . But there’s still a lot of tension when we complain that the profession isn’t moving fast enough in what it teaches undergraduates and graduate students” (from Colander, Holt, and Rosser 2004: ch. 3).

In 2003, Herb retired from his professorship at the University of Massachusetts, but he continued to pursue his research and writing at the Santa Fe Institute, where he had an appointment as an “external professor.” While there, he worked with Sam to complete work on their final jointly authored book, Bowles and Gintis (2011). Like Herb’s very first research, but now extending back tens of thousands of years into human prehistory, this work explores the conditions under which our preferences—in this case our altruism and cooperativeness—evolved in response to the social conditions under which we live.

Herb passed away on January 5, 2023, after a life of extraordinary achievement in a remarkable number of different activities and fields of work—fighting for good causes and shedding light on complex problems. In an email to friends and colleagues on the day he died, Sam wrote that “Herb spent a lifetime of scholarly passion against injustice and untruth, challenging the old and creating new ways of doing the many sciences of human behavior.” Herb will be sorely missed not only by his own family members but by hundreds of friends and professional colleagues, as well as many thousands of students whom he taught and/or advised over almost six decades.