The Effortless Economy of Science?

Science and Cultural Theory

by Philip Mirowski

A leading scholar of the history and philosophy of economic thought, Philip Mirowski argues that there has been a top-to-bottom transformation in how scientific research is organized and funded in Western countries over the past two decades and that these changes necessitate a reexamination of the ways that science and economics interact. Mirowski insists on the need to bring together the insights of economics, science studies, and the philosophy of science in order to understand how and why particular research programs get stabilized through interdisciplinary appropriation, controlled attributions of error, and funding restrictions. Mirowski contends that neoclassical economists have persistently presumed and advanced an “effortless economy of science,” a misleading model of a self-sufficient and conceptually self-referential social structure that transcends market operations in pursuit of absolute truth. In the stunning essays collected here, he presents a radical critique of the ways that neoclassical economics is used to support, explain, and legitimate the current social practices underlying the funding and selection of “successful” science projects. He questions a host of theories, including the portraits of science put forth by Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Thomas Kuhn. Among the many topics he examines are the social stabilization of quantitative measurement, the repressed history of econometrics, and the social construction of the laws of supply and demand and their putative opposite, the gift economy. In The Effortless Economy of Science? Mirowski moves beyond grand abstractions about science, truth, and democracy in order to begin to talk about the way science is lived and practiced today.

Genres: Economics, Science, History Of Science, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Philip Mirowski (born 21 August 1951, Jackson, Michigan) is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame (Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science). He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979, and is a Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

Reviews

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good Mirowski book that covers a lot of different subjects. The book can be seen, at least in its initial chapters, as a narrative history of different heretics across different scientific disciplines. Mirowski begins with himself and an autobiographical essay entitled Confessions of an Aging Enfant Terrible. This, combined with the introductory chapter, set the stage for social studies of science and how Mirowski's personal focus has shifted, at least in this work. He covers Polanyi, Hayek, Kuhn, and Kitcher. Part 3 is mathematical philosophy, which is relevant to economics, but Chapter 7 is a very heavy chapter about maths philosophy.

There is interesting discussion of Mandelbrot's contributions to economics in the section about empirical economics. And the final section is about laws of supply and demand. Supposed laws, that is. As Mirowski makes the argument across 4 essays that there are no such immutable transcultural transhistorical laws.

this book is a good reading for someone interested in philosophy of science or economics, although specific chapters may be selected and read independently if necessary. Although the book does build upon itself, so it may still be beneficial to read the whole thing through.

4/5, it's pretty good. Mirowski's work is very readable in this book and a lot of the irony which characterizes More Heat than Light or Machine Dreams is absent, so it may make for more acceptable reading to the particularly sensitive economist.