Samuel Bowles

Paper #: 09-04-008

The joint dynamics of population-level social institutions and individual preferences (or more broadly cultures) are illustrated in four case studies: the end of Communist Party rule in the German Democratic Republic, the transformation of traditional contracts governing agricultural work in the Philippines, the demise of Apartheid in South Africa, and the spread and retreat of female genital cutting in West Africa. A stochastic evolutionary game model of the underlying processes captures five interrelated aspects of real world historical dynamics: its often bottom- up and decentralized nature, the complementarity between cultural and institutional dynamics, the long term persistence of inefficient institutions, the often revolutionary nature of institutional and cultural change and the prominent role of technical change in the process of institutional and cultural innovation.

PDF