More Heat than Light : Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics
Author: Philip Mirowski, Craufurd D. Goodwin
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ISBN: 0521426898
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (29 November, 1991)
Sales Rank: 185,950
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Excellent Book
Mirowski's argument is that economists as it is practiced today is simply thermodynamics circa-1855. The neoclassical notion of "utility" is the thermodynamic notion of potential energy, which is a version of the vis viva of Kant. The Laplacian dream of a perfectly mathematizable, atomic world is preserved, as if mummified, in economics even though the mathematics (and the physics) is nearly 150 years old. Mirowski goes back to Adam Smith and notes that in Smith there is the same dream of a "social physics," except that Smith understood physics more as Cartesian vortices than Newtonian gravity. Mirowski has a very interesting story to tell, the basic problem is that he mixes it with his own homegrown theory of Western Civilization that only confuses the basic argument. The equation of body-motion-energy may or may not be a central motif in economic history, but that argument is separate from the very interesting story of economics as social physics. Too bad he didn't save his little pet theory for another book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Imaginary worlds of theory
This fascinating upgrage of the author's earlier _Against Mechanism_ gives a severe account of the state of mathematical economics as it has been since the marginalist revolution. It is a reminder that mathematical technique and basic modeling are two separate activities and that understanding what it is that one is attempting to make into a science is not so easy. It is probably true no deterministic mathematical science of any type known is possible in a medium involving human consciousness. Yet the obsession to treat these different domains of discourse as analogous to physics or amenable to predictive science via the apparatus of differential equations simply refuses to die. It is a peculiar history, that some very good mathematicians of the nineteenth century, who understood the physics, found bizarre at the start, before the bad habits of phantom thinking became institutionalized. Mirowski's expose of the whole game is priceless, and almost unnerving. Hm, ideology perhaps Very important book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Update
Since having reviewed this book in September 1999, I was inspired by it to resolve Mirowski's Thesis in a recent paper called 'The Futility of Utility' (Physica A,2000). My resolution shows that both Varian and Mirowski were partly wrong. Mirowski is right in one sense: when dynamics is taken into account in the theory of production then the generic case (nonintegrable dynamics) is that utility is a path-dependent functional, and so doesn't exist mathematically as a function of demand. In this case (as Osborne observed from empirical data) price as a function of demand does not exist (the 'cartoons' passing as graphs in Samuelson's textbook can't be constructed from real market data). Varian was wrong: the most trivial integrability conditions are violated in this case because utility as a function cannot be postulated but either exists or doesn't according to dynamics. On the other hand, Mirowski was wrong that an analog of kinetic energy, or even a conserved quantity, is required. Utility is not, as Mirowski believed, analogous to potential energy: it is analogous to what physicists call the action. When optimization-control dynamics (Hamiltonian dynamics in econometrics) is integrable, then the action is a function, not merely a path-dependent functional (see Liouville's integrability theorem, ca. 1880, also discussed in 1916 by Einstein in the context of why Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization fails). Similar Products
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