The Effortless Economy of Science?
Philip MirowskiPhilip 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.
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