Philip Mirowski

More heat than light : economics as social physics, physics as nature's economics

List of figures List of tables Epigraph Acknowledgments Dedication 1. The fearful spheres of Pascal and Parmenides 2. Everything an economist needs to know about physics but was probably afraid to ask: the history of the energy concept 3. Body, motions and value 4. Science and substance theories of value in political economy to 1870 5. Neoclassical economics: an irresistible field of force meets an immovable object 6. The corruption of the field theory of value, and the retrogression to substance theories of value: neoclassical production theory 7. The ironies of physics envy 8. Universal history is the story of different intonations given to a handful of metaphors.

The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective

* Introduction Dieter Plehwe Part I. Origins of National Traditions * French Neoliberalism and Its Divisions: From the Colloque Walter Lippmann to the Fifth Republic Francois Denord * Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930--1980 Keith Tribe * Neoliberalism in Germany: Revisiting the Ordoliberal Foundations of the Social Market Economy Ralf Ptak * The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism Philip Mirowski and Rob van Horn Part II. Arguing out Strategies on Targeted Topics * The Neoliberals Confront the Trades Unions Yves Steiner * Reinventing Monopoly and the Role of Corporations: Chicago School of Law and Economics Rob van Horn * The Origins of Neoliberal Economic Development Discourse Dieter Plehwe * Business Conservatives and the Mont Pelerin Society Kim Phillips-Fein Part III. Mobilizations for Action * The Influence of Neoliberals in Chile before, during, and after Pinochet Karin Fischer * Taking Aim at the New International Economic Order Jennifer Bair * How Neoliberalism Makes a World: The Urban Property Project in Peru Tim Mitchell * Postface: Defining Neoliberalism Philip Mirowski * Index

The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research

The early 1980s constituted a watershed in science, mainly concerning the extent and nature of globalization and commercialization of scientific research, and its impact upon the university. Considerable debate has arisen about the sources of this transition, but aside from a few lone voices, the scholarly literature has neglected the concurrent rise of the contract research organization (CRO) and its role in the commercialization of scientific research. The CRO warrants wider attention as a modern paradigm of privatized science in the biopharmaceutical sector. In discussing the CRO’s technologies, the purposes they pursue, and the legal and policy initiatives that have fostered their rapid rise, we confront the wider implications of the modern regime of commercialized science for the future conduct of scientific research. We identify five areas of innovation: treatment of human subjects, control of disclosure, subjection of research tools to commercialization, redefinition of authorship, and re-engineering the goals of research.

Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science

In this special issue, we focus on the particular impacts of neoliberalism as a regime of scientific management. Drawing on a wide range of studies from other fields, as well as the four cases in this issue, we argue that while there are important differences in how neoliberalism has been implemented across nations and disciplines, there are a set of key principles and common outcomes that can serve a heuristic function for STS scholars attempting a more careful examination of neoliberalism. These common outcomes include: the rollback of public funding for universities; the separation of research and teaching missions, leading to rising numbers of temporary faculty; the dissolution of the scientific author; the narrowing of research agendas to focus on the needs of commercial actors; an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate intellectual disputes; and the intense fortification of intellectual property in an attempt to commercialize knowledge, impeding the production and dissemination of science. Taken together, these shifts suggest that the impact of neoliberal science policy and management extends far beyond the patent system into the methods, organization, and content of science. We thus urge STS scholars to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political—economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience.

From Mandelbrot to Chaos in Economic Theory

We are living in the midst of a profound rupture between older and emergent notions of scientific explanation [67; 68; 24; 25; 51]. The very meanings of order and chaos, the deterministic and the stochastic, are being reconceptualized in this decade, and it is fair to presume that things will never be the same. Some economists, understandably, do not want to be left in the lurch, and have turned their prodigious efforts to assimilation of some of the new doctrines and mathematical techniques. But, so far, what this movement lacks is historical perspective. While it is easy to be swept up in the enthusiasm of the moment for what is unquestionably one of the most significant intellectual innovations of the century, that still does not absolve the economist from asking some very basic questions: Why should this particular set of ideas or mathematical formalisms be wellsuited to economic discourse? What is it about this new mathematics that will necessarily improve economics? What accounts for this rush to appropriate new techniques? How will they change the way economics is done? Despite the appearance of numerous survey articles these questions have not yet been adequately addressed [5; 11; 33]. The reason these questions languish is that they are inherently historical rather than narrowly technical. Since most economists cannot be presumed to have a firm background in the histories of physics or of economics, and such a background cannot be provided in the space of a journal article, most of the statements made in this section about these histories will not be documented here, although the reader is directed to some of the authors writings [56; 57; 58; 61; 62] for the corroborating evidence. All that can be accomplished here is to set the stage for the narratives in the subsequent sections of this paper, which will document the historical relationship (or, more to the point, the lack thereof) between Benoit Mandelbrots work in economics and the later work of such authors as J. Grandmont, R. Day, J. Benhabib, W. Brock, J. Scheinkman, W. Barnett, P. Chen and others in attempting to import the insights of chaos theory into economics. The purpose of this narrative is to illustrate the major thesis of this paper, namely, that economists

Interest Rates and Crowding-Out During Britain's Industrial Revolution

Available evidence on interest rates and government borrowing during Britains industrial revolution, while limited, does not support the idea that war spending crowded out private investment. This article demonstrates the importance of using data on net receipts from borrowing, rather than changes in government debt. Weaknesses of the crowding-out model concerning capital markets and investment, openness of the economy, and full employment are identified for the historical case. The case raises broader issues of whether conceptions of saving and investment based in neoclassical supply-constrained models are as appropriate as theories of capital accumulation.

The Rise (and Retreat) of a Market: English Joint Stock Shares in the Eighteenth Century

The market for joint stock shares in eighteenth-century England is often portrayed as an underdeveloped and flawed mechanism for resource allocation, which in turn is cited to explain the paucity of shares actually traded. This article questions that interpretation, both by inquiring whether the requisite institutions for a functional market were present, and by constructing a new time series of eighteenth-century share prices and exposing them to a test of the efficient markets hypothesis. Because the stock exchange is found to exhibit most of the conventionally defined characteristics of an effective market, the article concludes by outlining the case for skepticism with respect to a common theme in economic history: the idea that the purported superiority of market resource allocation over alternative non-market forms (in the absence of rigidities due to underdevelopment or government interference) is an unambiguous conclusion in every historical context.

Mathematical Formalism and Economic Explanation

Is there really nothing useful or novel to be said about the relationship between the study of economic phenomena and the casting of economic inquiry in quantitative and mathematical format? Everyone is fully aware that the trend over the last century has been toward ever greater mathematical sophistication as part and parcel of the professionalization of the disci-pline of economics. Everyone is equally aware that this trend has provoked periodic controversies over the meaning and significance of this conjunc-ture. Where awareness, or perhaps self-consciousness, is deficient is in the areas of the historical determinants of mathematical conceptualization, and of recent developments in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

Cyborg agonistes : Economics meets Operations Research in mid-century

The importance of the rise of Operations Research (OR) for the postwar development of economics is a theme entirely absent from both the history of science and the history of economics. This paper explores a number of theses which will help to rectify that situation: (1) the existing history of OR, including the landmark paper by Fortun and Schweber (1993), stands in need of revision; (2) the neoclassical tradition in America had encountered some daunting obstacles in the 1930s; (3) the recruitment of a generation of economists into OR during World War II created a possible way out of this impasse; and (4) differences in analytical content of various schools of OR can be mapped on to postwar differences between schools of American neoclassical economics and, in particular, the Chicago School and the Cowles Commission. This narrative constitutes the outline of a thesis that World War II marked the second large-scale incursion of physicists into neoclassical economics.

Inherent Vice: Minsky, Markomata, and the tendency of markets to undermine themselves

Most current explanations of the crisis which began in 2007/8 tend to search for scapegoats, in the format of behavioral flaws. Their treatment of ‘risk’ is an important signpost to where such theories go awry. This paper suggests a structural theory of the crisis, informed by Institutionalist themes. We insist there is an alternative to a neoclassical macroeconomics, in the guise of possible alternative heterodox microfoundations for Minsky’s account of economic crises, beyond the Kaleckian markup model. The sketch is based upon elevation of some formal notions of computational complexity to pride of place, and characterization of crises as a collapse of complexity. It is an attempt to portray a market system evolving to a point of ‘inherent vice’: an endogenous development which by its very nature, cannot be tamed through conventional insurance or risk models. Inherent vice (n., insurance terminology): An exclusion found in most property insurance policies eliminating coverage for loss caused by a quality in property that causes it to damage or destroy itself. . . . the economy is a complex system of interacting individuals – and these individuals themselves are complex systems. Neoclassical economics radically oversimplifies both the individuals and the system – and gets a lot of mileage by doing that; I, for one, am not going to banish maximization-and-equilibrium from my toolbox. But the temptation is always to keep on applying these extreme simplifications, even where the evidence clearly shows that they’re wrong. What economists have to do is learn to resist that temptation. (Paul Krugman blog, 5 September 2009) The dynamics of a capitalist economy which has complex, sophisticated and evolving financial structures leads to development of conditions conducive to incoherence. (Hyman Minsky, 1986: 10) Nick Paumgarten (2009), in a New Yorker version of irony, has compiled a laundry list of more than a hundred proposed causes of the world economic ∗Email: pmirowsk@nd.edu Apologies to Thomas Pynchon. Thanks to Don MacKenzie, and three anonymous referees for comments.