Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. By Philip Mirowski. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 655. $35.00, paper

Warren Samuels

The Journal of Economic History, 2002, vol. 62, issue 3, 913-915

Abstract: It is impossible to summarize and critique this book adequately in a short review. Its author is a leading historian of economic thought, skilled in many disciplines, imaginative and penetrating in analysis, and possessed of knowledge, brilliance, and pixie-like cynicism. His More Heat than Light (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) traced the origins of twentieth-century economics to a mimicking of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics in order to achieve the status of “science.” This book traces the social construction of high theory in economics during World War II and the Cold War to the influence of John von Neumann's general theory of automata and the military funding of basic economic science. Like his earlier book, this is history of economics on a massively ambitious scale—a theory of the entire postwar period.

Date: 2002
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