THINKING BEYOND "THE AMORAL AND SELF-INTERESTED HOMO ECONOMICUS"

Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Should we look to economic man--the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus--to tell us how people will respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding 'no.' Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may 'crowd out' ethical and generous motives and thus backfire. But incentives, per se, are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by economic incentives is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the employees is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives and other policies can crowd in the civic motives in which good governance depends.").