Philip Mirowski

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.

Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics

More Heat Than Light

Carl E Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Philip Mirowski

This is 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.

Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science

Machine Dreams

Edward M. Nik-Khah

Information is a central concept in economics, and The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information explores its treatment in modern economics. The study of information, far from offering enlightenment, resulted in all matter of confusion for economists and the public. Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah argue that the conventional wisdom suggesting "economic rationality" was the core of modern economics is incomplete. In this trenchant investigation, they demonstrate that the history of modern microeconomics is better organized as a history of the treatment of information. The book begins with a brief primer on information, and then shows how economists have responded over time to successive developments on the concept of information in the natural sciences. Mirowski and Nik-Khah detail various intellectual battles that were fought to define, analyze, and employ information in economics. As these debates developed, economists progressively moved away from pure agent conscious self-awareness as a non-negotiable desideratum of economic models toward a focus on markets and their design as information processors. This has led to a number of policies, foremost among them: auction design of resources like the electromagnetic spectrum crucial to modern communications. The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information provides insight into the interface between disputes within the economics discipline and the increasing role of information in contemporary society. Mirowski and Nik-Khah examine how this intersection contributed to the dominance of neoliberal approaches to economics, politics, and other realms.

The History of Information in Modern Economics

The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. And yet, in the harsh light of a new day, we've awoken to a second nightmare more ghastly than the first- a political class still blaming government intervention, a global drive for austerity, stagflation, and an international sovereign debt crisis. Philip Mirowski finds an apt comparison to this situation in classic studies of cognitive dissonance. He concludes that neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the 'real' economy.

How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

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.

The Effortless Economy of Science?

Thomas A. Stapleford

Robert Van Horn

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.

New Perspectives on the History of America's Most Powerful Economics Program

Building Chicago Economics

Esther-Mirjam Sent

Although it has long been accepted that economics can provide tools with which to understand science, economics has shifted its focus to the economic agent as information processor. This collection of essays presents an overview of this area.

Essays in the Economics of Science

Science Bought and Sold

Dieter Plehwe

Quinn Slobodian

Untangling the long history of neoliberalism Neoliberalism is dead. Again. Yet the philosophy of the free market and the strong state has an uncanny capacity to survive, and even thrive, in times of crisis. Understanding neoliberalism’s longevity and its latest permutation requires a more detailed understanding of its origins and development. This volume breaks with the caricature of neoliberalism as a simple, unvariegated belief in market fundamentalism and homo economicus. It shows how neoliberal thinkers perceived institutions from the family to the university, disagreed over issues from intellectual property rights and human behavior to social complexity and monetary order, and sought to win consent for their project through the creation of new honors, disciples, and networks. Far from a monolith, neoliberal thought is fractured and, occasionally, even at war with itself. We can begin to make sense of neoliberalism’s nine lives only by understanding its own tangled and complex history.

Nine Lives of Neoliberalism

La crisis económica que hemos padecido estos últimos años ha causado estragos entre las clases medias y bajas, y ha disparado los índices de desigualdad. No obstante, no se ha hecho nada para evitar que en un futuro las causas que nos llevaron a la crisis puedan volver a repetirse. Asimismo, los máximos responsables del desastre no sólo no han sido juzgados y condenados, sino que siguen en sus cargos haciendo exactamente lo mismo que hacían antes de la crisis: enriquecerse a costa del resto de la sociedad. Amparados bajo la doctrina neoliberal imperante y cobijados por quienes la defi enden, su respuesta es sólo una: abordar la crisis como si de un acto divino se tratara y seguir adelante, una máxima que ha paralizado todo intento de enmendar el desastre. Cualquier evidencia empírica se interpreta como un refuerzo de la teoría revelada, de tal modo que nadie puede oponerse a ella. Así, como un monolito de pensamiento, el neoliberalismo se erige sólido y hegemónico, mientras la izquierda naufraga, en parte víctima de su propio aniquilamiento y la economía neoclásica es desterrada por la austeridad ofi cial. En este relato afi lado, lúcido e informado, Mirowski da cuenta de una paradoja macabra: la de cómo el neoliberalismo nos llevó al colapso fi nanciero, sobrevivió y a la postre ha salido reforzado de él. Al mismo tiempo, esta obra sienta las bases para una crítica del modelo ortodoxo imperante y ofrece nuevas perspectivas de futuro.

¿Cómo ha conseguido el neoliberalismo, responsable de la crisis, salir indemne de la misma?

Nunca dejes que una crisis te gane la partida

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.

Science-Mart

This 1994 book was the first collection devoted to impact of natural sciences on content and form of economics in history.

Markets Read in Tooth and Claw

Natural Images in Economic Thought

"Jahrhundertkrise", "Bankencrash", "Systemkollaps" – Markige Worte wurden bemüht, um die Wirtschaftskrise zu beschreiben, die in den letzten Jahren zum Bankrott ganzer Länder geführt hat und den Euro an den Rand des Abgrunds trieb. Markige Worte, die nach grundlegenden Änderungen schreien. Doch als wäre nichts geschehen, geht alles weiter wie bisher: Die neoliberale Wirtschaft beginnt erneut heißzulaufen, Staatsinvestitionen sind weiter verpönt und schon sieht man wieder die ersten Spekulationsblasen wachsen. Angesichts dieser aberwitzigen Beharrungskräfte verfolgt Philip Mirowski das neoliberale Projekt bis zu seinen Anfängen zurück und zeigt, wie es gelingen konnte, der Welt eine ökonomische Theorie nach starren mathematischen Gesetzen überzustülpen, die sich als stählernes Mantra festgesetzt hat. Seine tiefgreifende, bissig und anschaulich geschriebene Untersuchung, die Intellectual History, Kulturkritik und die Aufdeckung des Einflusses mächtiger Interessenverbände umfasst, zeigt zudem, dass sich der Neoliberalismus mittlerweile zu einer Kultur verdichtet hat, die alle Bereiche unseres Lebens bestimmt und auch unser Denken fest im Griff hat. Die Krise der Wirtschaft entpuppt sich so auch als intellektuelle Krise.

Warum der Neoliberalismus nach der Krise noch stärker ist

Untote leben länger

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. Yet in the harsh light of a new day, attacks against government intervention and the global drive for austerity are as strong as ever. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste is the definitive account of the wreckage of what passes for economic thought, and how neoliberal ideas were used to solve the very crisis they had created. Now updated with a new afterword, Philip Mirowski’s sharp and witty work provides a roadmap for those looking to escape today’s misguided economic dogma.

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.

What exactly is neoliberalism, and where did it come from? This volume attempts to answer these questions by exploring neoliberalism’s origins and growth as a political and economic movement. Now with a new preface.

The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, With a New Preface

The Road from Mont Pèlerin

Jens Schröter

Edward Nik-Khah

Armin Beverungen

A media theory of markets Markets abound in media—but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building on such work, this volume brings together key thinkers of economic studies with German media theory, describes the central role of the media specificity of markets in new detail and inflects them in three distinct ways. Nik-Khah and Mirowski show how the denigration of human cognition and the concomitant faith in computation prevalent in contemporary market-design practices rely on neoliberal conceptions of information in markets. Schröter confronts the asymmetries and abstractions that characterize money as a medium and explores the absence of money in media. Beverungen situates these inflections and gathers further elements for a politically and historically attuned media theory of markets concerned with contemporary phenomena such as high-frequency trading and cryptocurrencies.

Philip Mirowski

Books

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