Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science - Hardcover

Mirowski, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521772834 ISBN 13: 9780521772839

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Synopsis

This is the first cross-over book in the history of science written by an historian of economics, combining a number of disciplinary and stylistic orientations. In it Philip Mirowshki shows how what is conventionally thought to be "history of technology" can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. His analysis combines Cold War history with the history of the postwar economics profession in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with the content of such abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. He links the literature on "cyborg science" found in science studies to economics, an element missing in the literature to date. Mirowski further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents found in the larger culture, arguing that neoclassical economics has surreptitiously participated in the desconstruction of the integral "Self." Finally, he argues for a different style of economics, 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. Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame. He teaches in both the economics and science studies communities and has written frequently for academic journals. He is also the author of More Heat than Light (Cambridge, 1992) and editor of Natural Images in Economics (Cambridge, 1994) and Science Bought and Sold (University of Chicago, 2001).

About this title

Book Description

Machine Dreams recounts the story of how the computer came to transform the very content of American economics, and how the mathematician John von Neumann inadvertently became the most important thinker for the economics profession in the 20th century. The narrative crosses the two genres of the history of economic thought and World War II, arguing that the Second World War and the Cold War were central to the postwar rise of the neoclassical orthodoxy in America. The treatment concludes with reflections on the ways in which the computer will further transform economics in the 21st century.

About the Author

Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. His areas of specialization are in the history and philosophy of economics and the politics and economics of knowledge, with subsidiary areas in evolutionary computational economics, the economics of science and technological change, science studies and the history of the natural sciences. His most recent books include The Effortless Economy of Science (2004, winner of the Ludwig Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science), Machine Dreams (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and ScienceMart (2011), and he edited Agreement on Demand (2006), Science Bought and Sold (2001) and The Road from Mont Pelerin (2009). His landmark book More Heat than Light (Cambridge University Press, 1989) has been translated into French (2001). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright program and New York University and was elected visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was elected President of the History of Economics Society for 2011.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521772834
• ISBN 13: 9780521772839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 670