Herbert Gintis and the Societal Origins of Preferences: A Personal Memoir

Abstract

In this personal memoir of my lifelong collaborator and friend, Herb Gintis, I reflect on his “A Radical Analysis of Welfare Economics and Individual Development.” Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1972, the article advances a novel Marx-inspired interpretation of the societal origins of preferences, one that profoundly influenced the ideas of a group of like-minded young economists at Harvard at the time, economics more broadly, and Herb and my subsequent joint work.

JEL Classification: B14, B21, D01

During the more than half century of our collaboration, my life and Herb’s were bound together by a common and evolving scholarly project, by engagement with a political aspiration (broadly shared and sometimes contested), and by our love. He was more than a brother. My “brain wife” is what Elisabeth Wood, my (actual) wife, called him, witness that she unavoidably was to our daily phone exchanges: the loud exuberance of our joint exploration and discovery (“you won’t believe what the Price equation implies!”) and the heated, even shouted, debates (Herb to Sam: “you sound just like PL!” [a Marxist-Leninist group]; Sam to Herb: “you’ve never gotten over being in love with Talcott Parsons!” [more on that later]). We came not to care about whose lightbulb idea a new insight was, or even to remember.

I have been asked by many outlets to write an academic-style obituary for Herb, which I have found impossible to do for many reasons, but in part because, in a sense I would be writing my own: saying that Schooling in Capitalist America is a pretty good book would seem odd, at best. Tom Weisskopf’s tribute in this journal beautifully describes Herb’s contributions.

What I do here, instead, is to reflect on an extraordinary early work in which Herb laid out a distinctive research paradigm of his own making. This is his “A Radical Analysis of Welfare Economics and Individual Development,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) in 1972. He began with: “. . . welfare depends not only on what an individual has but on what he/she is.” Then, paraphrasing Marx’s dictum that “by acting on the external world and changing it [the worker] at the same time changes his own nature,” Herb proposed that “changes in the structure of economic institutions produce changes in. . . paths of individual development.” He concluded that economics should treat “preference structures as endogenous” in opposition to “neoclassical theory [that] takes as given individual ‘tastes.’”

In case you think the “radical” in the title of his paper is overblown, cast your mind back to the day. About the time Herb’s paper was published, Gary Becker and George Stigler explained the title of their “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum” paper this way: “One does not argue about tastes for the same reason that one does not argue about the Rocky Mountains—both are there, and will be there tomorrow, and are the same to all men.” But two decades after this affirmation of the conventional canon, the Rocky Mountains seemingly had shifted, and Becker titled his collected essays Accounting for Tastes. In that work, he quoted Marx’s dictum (must have been a first for Becker), and he called Herb’s work “pioneering, but. . . marred by an excessive ideological slant.”

Today, asserting that preferences are endogenous risks being charged with banality, not controversy or error. A book by the leading microeconomist David Kreps based on the 2022 Kenneth Arrow Lectures is titled Arguing about Tastes: Modeling How Context and Experience Change Economic Preferences. Models of cultural evolution that formalize the idea of endogenous preferences due to Alberto Bisin and Thierry Verdier and others have been added to the economists’ toolbox.

Far from ideological, Herb’s “Radical Analysis” paper is a model of pluralism. He drew on sources (in French and German as well as English) from history, psychology, sociology, and politics, in addition to economics. And his main methodological stroke was to hijack Talcott Parsons’s structural functional sociology to clarify and extend Marx’s insights about culture and human development. The result was an odd couple: Parsons had recently advanced the idea that money, markets, bureaucracy, and social stratification were all what he termed “evolutionary universals,” a concept antithetical to Marxian thinking. But Parsons got more references in Herb’s paper than does Marx. (The first line of the acknowledgements in Herb’s dissertation recognized his “intellectual debt to the two greatest social scientists of all times: Karl Marx and Talcott Parsons.”)

Parsons, at the time probably the most admired sociologist in the world, was not impressed. He took the time to write a long critique of Herb’s “Radical Analysis,” also published in the QJE with a response by Herb (at the time a new assistant professor in the Harvard School of Education).

Those were different times. Early in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (whom I knew through the anti-war movement) sent us a set of questions about economics as part of the buildup to the Poor People’s March that he was organizing just before his death. We were shocked, even angered, at how little our advanced training in the field had prepared us to respond to Dr. King. (I should not have been surprised; my students in Harvard’s Ec10 regularly asked me questions that I could not begin to answer about inequality, war, and the environment.) A group formed to draft background papers for Dr. King. Thrilled by the experience of doing economics on things we cared about, we went on to propose a new intro to economics course, which our Economics Department colleagues rejected (because it was “not economics”).

In 1969, we managed to smuggle the course into the Harvard curriculum: “Soc Sci 125: Power and Conflict in the US Economy” was co-taught by Tom Weisskopf, Rick Edwards, Michael Reich, Arthur MacEwan, Peter and Roger Bohmer, Stephan Michelson, Paddy Quick, Keith Aufhauser, Carl Gotsch, Ralph Pachoda (in addition to Herb and me), and in later years by many other doctoral candidates in economics. (We described the course in a paper in the American Economic Review (AER) Papers and Proceedings in 1970.) Among other themes in the course, we explored how schools produce future workers with values and expectations suitable for subordinate roles in the capitalist economy.

Economics then was schizophrenic about endogenous preferences. Microeconomic theorists dismissed the idea, even while “everybody knew” that owners of companies paid for advertising to affect consumer’s preferences (a major theme in Galbraith’s writings at the time), and that James Dusenbery was correct in thinking that the degree of satisfaction with our consumption bundle depends on what others are consuming. But Herb went beyond these commonplace observations and the “sociologists [who, he wrote] emphasize the direct social mechanisms—family, school, and media” to propose a surprising and subtle general theory of the way in which societal institutions shaped the evolution of preferences.

The common element in “family, schools, and media,” the three mechanisms that Herb identified with “institutional” mechanisms affecting preference development, is that some actors—parents, teachers, advertisers—intentionally shape the preferences of others, whitewashing the history of slavery in high school courses so as to promote more patriotic feelings, for example. Herb did not doubt the force of what I will call indoctrination, but he held that a set of societal influences on preferences that he termed “cybernetic” are at the same time more pervasive and less visible.

The key idea, borrowed from Marx, Herb wrote, is that “the individual develops capacities for deriving welfare from ‘alternative’ activities directly through the pattern of activities and social relations available and. . . into which she enters in. . . daily life. . . [such that, for example] the pattern of available commodities plays a direct role in determining the pattern of individual preferences.” One does not develop a taste for classical music, for example, if the price of concerts or digitally available music is prohibitive. When Herb and I taught the history of economic thought at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass), he enjoyed engaging (and mystifying) students by inverting the classical economic language, saying instead that exchange value affects use values: you do not develop a taste for something that you cannot afford.

Available jobs and the social relationships that they entail also shape preferences: “individuals choose their particular path of individual development on the basis of the existing patterns of work activities.” A result is “that a particular set of work activities is ‘brutalizing’ or ‘alienating’ does not mean merely that it has low immediate welfare value. It means as well that individuals serving in these positions undergo detrimental patterns of individual development.” If the only jobs open to you are repetitive and routine, you are unlikely to cultivate intrinsic motivations such as the joy of problem solving and creativity at work. (Herb opened a small shop in Harvard Square, hand making shoes after he left the math PhD program at Harvard.)

The paper is remarkable for its modesty and circumspection: “On the empirical level,” Herb wrote, “we cannot hope to know, given the present state of social sciences, the impact of alternative institutions on individual development.” We were both on the lookout for empirical cases that would illustrate our thinking, if not actually allow tests of hypotheses entailed by it. This became a recurrent topic as, toward the end of the afternoon on Fridays, we enjoyed a beer and the jukebox at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square.

One afternoon at Charlie’s we hit on the idea that studying schools would fit the bill, providing insights about both alienation and the other themes of Herb’s thinking as well as inequality and the ways that it is perpetuated (that had been my focus over these years). Schools are deliberately designed to affect students’ values, their credentialing and other functions allocate access to economic privilege, and (importantly) they generate masses of data that we would eventually use to develop econometric tests of our ideas. The result after some years was our Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life.

Ideas stemming from Herb’s model of endogenous preferences were central to that work. In “Radical Analysis,” Herb had written that the market in labor provides price signals—relative wages for various kinds of work—“as a means of inducing paths of individual development compatible with motivations and capacities necessary in an alienated and bureaucratic work environment.” In his reply to Parsons the same year that we published Schooling, he elaborated that:

the educational system “supports” the economy most directly by selecting and generating noncognitive and nontechnical personal attributes relevant to operating in the hierarchical division of labor, and that it fulfills this function through the correspondence between the structure of social relations constituting the economic sphere on the one hand and the educational on the other.

This “correspondence principle” (as he called it) motivated our petition (also published in the AER) to abolish grades in Soc Sci 125, in which we held that grades are a form of extrinsic reward corresponding to the payment of wages for alienated labor. Harvard’s Committee on Educational Policy was unmoved by our reasoning.

Herb’s framework was a radical departure from the usual account of what schools do, focusing on their effects on preferences rather than skills, and depicting schools as contributing to the reproduction of the capitalist order not by indoctrination imposed by an elite, but instead with the assent of working-class parents mindful of what it would take for their children to succeed in the labor market.

The correspondence principle, along with Herb’s view that schools develop the “noncognitive and nontechnical personal attributes” of future workers, allowed for a number of testable hypotheses. In his “Radical Analysis,” Herb proposed (and later demonstrated econometrically) that the economic returns to education could not be explained by the higher cognitive performance of those with more years of schooling. I had suspected as much from what I was told by managers of trucking companies and warehouses in Northern Nigeria as part of my dissertation research: for tasks like unloading trucks, they were paying men with four years of primary schooling much more than those who had never seen a classroom. James Heckman and his coauthors, using more sophisticated techniques and better data, later reached the same conclusion (Heckman generously credits “Marxist economists” with having come up with the idea). Rick Edwards’s psychometric study showed that the personality traits rewarded by higher grades in schools closely matched the psychological traits of the “good worker” as gauged by supervisors’ rankings of workers’ suitability for promotion, a stunning confirmation of the correspondence principle.

Though recognized by those working in the field (especially, it seems, those from the University of Chicago), Herb’s early work has not yet received the recognition that it deserves, too much of the credit for his ideas being given to us jointly as authors of Schooling. Herb’s “Radical Analysis” was surely ahead of its time, and his inventiveness with the language did not help: “personological unit objects combining relational and functional modalities” can be chalked up to Parsons, but wherever these terms came from, they were not exactly meme material. A standard riddle at the time: “What is the difference between Herb Gintis and Perry Anderson (for many years, the erudite editor of the New Left Review)?” The answer? “The words Anderson uses are in the dictionary.”

In the 1990s, we returned to the question of endogenous preferences, with the formation of a research network along with Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, Daniel Kahneman, Ed Glaeser, Margo Wilson, Matthew Rabin, David Laibson, George Loewenstein, Paul Romer, and others. Herb led the group, along with the anthropologist Robert Boyd, a pioneer in the modeling of cultural evolution. Curiously in the 1980s, Herb and I had each independently begun studying evolutionary modeling of human behavior (how was that possible, given the daily phone conversations?). So had (also coincidentally) a number of other leftist economists including Ugo Pagano, Bob Rowthorn, Robert Boyer, and Goeffrey Hodgson.

Responding to the experimental findings of behavioral economics, we asked: What were the societal conditions that could have supported the cultural or genetic evolution of preferences leading humans to cooperate even with strangers and to contest injustice collectively? Though devoted to a question entirely unrelated to our earlier studies of schooling, our methods in A Cooperative Species provide a further example of Herb’s initial approach in “Radical Analysis.” We did not represent preference change as indoctrination by dominant elites, but instead as the result of the decentralized and often unwitting actions of individuals responding to the constraints and opportunities of their daily lives.

Using the methods of cultural evolution and population biology along with data from anthropology and population genetics, we provided an answer, published in A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution. We dedicated the book to our age mates James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, whose lives were taken in the struggle for civil rights in the United States the year Herb and I met.

And now Herb is gone, leaving a gaping hole in my life and in the lives of so many who have been touched by his imagination, open-minded passion (not to be confused with serial dogmatism), brilliance across mathematics and the social sciences, and his affection. We all share the gift of his prodigious half century of scholarship, rattling the cages of untruth and injustice.