REVIEW article
Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Culture and Ethics
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2025.1633414
This article is part of the Research TopicCapitalism, Conflict, and Cooperation: In Honor of Herbert GintisView all articles
Herb Gintis on Economics and Welfare, Political Economy, and Evolution and Human Behavior
Provisionally accepted
- Brown University, Providence, United States
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Herbert Gintis's research cut to the heart of what scientists must probe in order to understand what kinds of economic arrangements are possible, and which of those arrangements have the potential to make possible human flourishing among the largest numbers of people. Early in his career, he recognized that economics' standard depiction of human actors constituted a barrier to serious research on these questions. Gintis can be called a behavioral economist, but he was also an adept practitioner of neoclassical-style modeling, a game theorist, an insatiable reader of psychology, anthropology and sociology, a contributor to gene-culture coevolutionary analysis, and a sociobiologist in the broad sense of appreciating that the evolved Homo sapiens rewards inspection with the eye of an ethologist.
Keywords: JEL codes: I32, C70, D63, Well-being, Economic system, evolution, welfare, Behavioral Economics
Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 25 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Putterman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Louis Putterman, Brown University, Providence, United States
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