The Effortless Economy of Science?
Summary
The feel-good place to buy books
The Effortless Economy of Science? 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.
“The Effortless Economy of Science is an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science, history of economics, and science studiesPhilip Mirowski shows why work in each of these fields can be better understood by looking through the lens of other fields.”—Bradley W. Bateman, Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics, Grinnell College
Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. Among his books are Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science; More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics; and Science Bought and Sold: Essays in the Economics of Science (coedited with Esther-Mirjam Sent).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822333227 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822333228 |
| Title | The Effortless Economy of Science? |
| Author | Philip Mirowski |
| Series | Science And Cultural Theory |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
| Year published | 2004-07-21 |
| Number of pages | 472 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |