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
economics 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 are used to support, explain, and
legitimate the current social practices that lead to 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.
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