Philip Mirowski

This was the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents, arguing that neoclassical economics has participated in the deconstruction of the integral 'self'. Finally, it argues for an alliance of computational and institutional themes, and challenges the widespread impression that there is nothing else besides American neoclassical economic theory left standing after the demise of Marxism.

Over the past forty years, economists associated with the University of Chicago have won more than one-third of the Nobel prizes awarded in their discipline and have been major influences on American public policy. Building Chicago Economics presents the first collective attempt by social science historians to chart the rise and development of the Chicago School during the decades that followed the Second World War. Drawing on new research in published and archival sources, contributors examine the people, institutions and ideas that established the foundations for the success of Chicago economics and thereby positioned it as a powerful and controversial force in American political and intellectual life.

The ArgumentMany find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external warrant.This paper surveys the history of measurement standards, physical dimensions and dimensionless constants as one instance of the quest to purge all anthropomorphic taint first in the metric system, then in the dimensions provided by the atom, then in physical constants intelligible to extraterrestrials, only then to end up back at overt anthropomorphism in the late 20th century. This suggests that the “naturalness” of natural numbers has always been conceptualized in locally contingent cultural terms.

Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin verbs or Aristotle's Six Elements of Tragedy. Moreover, it has certainly become an academic cliché that economists write as gracefully and felicitously as a hundred monkeys chained to broken typewriters. The fact that economists still trot out Keynes's prose in their defense is itself an index of the inarticulate desperation of an inarticulate profession.

More Heat Than Light is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and also how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. It traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect upon the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics. Any discussion of the standing of economics as a science must include the historical symbiosis between the two disciplines. Starting with the philosopher Emile Meyerson's discussion of the relationship between notions of invariance and causality in the history of science, the book surveys the history of conservation principles in the Western discussion of motion. Recourse to the metaphors of the economy are frequent in physics, and the concepts of value, motion, and body reinforced each other throughout the development of both disciplines, especially with regard to practices of mathematical formalisation. However, in economics subsequent misuse of conservation principles led to serious blunders in the mathematical formalisation of economic theory. The book attempts to provide the reader with sufficient background in the history of physics in order to appreciate its theses. The discussion is technically detailed and complex, and familiarity with calculus is required.

Although the push to get universities to accumulate IP by commercializing their scientific research was a conscious movement, dealing with the blowback in the form of contracts over the transfer of research tools and inputs, called materials transfer agreements (MTAs), was greeted by universities as an afterthought. Faculty often regarded them as an irritant, and TTOs were not much more welcoming. One reason universities could initially ignore the obvious connection between the pursuit of patents and the prior promulgation of MTAs was a legalistic distinction made between intellectual property and contract law, which of course is of direct concern to a lawyer, but should be less compelling for anyone trying to understand the big picture surrounding the commercialization of academic science. However, as a subset of scientists were increasingly drawn into the commercial sphere, they tended to attach MTAs to research inputs requested by other academics; and this began a tidal wave of MTAs which shows no sign of abating. Furthermore, many IP-related restrictions have been loaded into individual MTAs, including the stipulation that the existence and content of MTAs themselves be treated as secret and proprietary. The paper closes by looking at recent arguments that the growth of MTAs has not actually harmed the research process, and rejects them

The ArgumentWhile there has been muchattention given to experiment in modern science studies, there has been astoundingly little concern spared over the practice ofquanitataivemeasurment.Thus myths about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematice in science still abound. This paper presents: An explicit mathematical model of the stabilization of quantitative constants in a mathematical science to rival older Bayesian and classical accounts;a framework for writing a history of pracitces with regard to treatment of quantitative measurement erroe; resourece for the comparative sociology of differing discipliness in this regard;and a prolegonmena to a critique of orthodox economics and accounting theories. The key to all these diverse themes is the realization that no one individual alone is capable of fixing the magnitude of a quantitative error estimate, and therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise meaning, an therefore the social construction of error must be given a more precise menaing, and that this occurs through the istrumentality of meta-analysis.

Recent breakthroughs in the history and sociology of science have begun to help us to appreciate the vast complexity and intricate character of empirical endeavours in the sciences. The days when philosophers could blandly gesture towards “observation statements” or “falsification,” as if they were some readily understood phenomena or set of procedures, are gone, happily. This does not mean we can merely use the Duhem-Quine thesis as a shibboleth, however: we are now much more sensitive to immense difficulties in establishing viable claims to replication or establishing the absence of selectivity bias, or convincing others of adequacy of experimental controls. Yet, even so, I would still assert that modern science studies, with only a very few exceptions, have ignored the problem of the constitution of error in the context of precision quantitative measurement. While rather broad claims have been made concerning measurement by Hacking, Cartwright, Franklin and others, none goes so far as to examine the actual manipulation of the numerical data. More distressingly, in the areas of economics and economic methodology, we have not even got so far as have the researchers in science studies. This fact alone should provide grounds for scepticism about the claim in Cartwright that philosophy of scientific inference has something to learn from the history of econometrics.