An Engine, Not a Camera
Click to look inside
An Engine, Not a Camera
Proud to be B-Corp
Our business meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. In short, we care about people and the planet.
The feel-good place to buy books
- Free delivery in Ireland
- Supporting authors with AuthorSHARE
- 100% recyclable packaging
- Proud to be a B Corp – A Business for good
- Buy-back with Ziffit
An Engine, Not a Camera by Donald Mackenzie
In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as futures. By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.
MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of wild randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780262134606 |
| ISBN 10 | 0262134608 |
| Title | An Engine, Not a Camera |
| Author | Donald Mackenzie |
| Series | Inside Technology |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | The Mit Press |
| Year published | 2006-04-14 |
| Number of pages | 392 |
| Prizes | Winner of BISA International Political Economy Group Book Prize 2007 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |