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'More Heat Than Light' is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and also how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. It traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect upon the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics. Any discussion of the standing of economics as a science must include the historical symbiosis between the two disciplines. Starting with the philosopher Emile Meyerson's discussion of the relationship between notions of invariance and causality in the history of science, the book surveys the history of conservation principles in the Western discussion of motion. Recourse to the metaphors of the economy are frequent in physics, and the concepts of value, motion, and body reinforced each other throughout the development of both disciplines, especially with regard to practices of mathematical formalisation. However, in economics subsequent misuse of conservation principles led to serious blunders in the mathematical formalisation of economic theory.
Author(s): Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 1989
Language: English
Pages: 465
More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics
Front Cover 1
Front Cover 2
Half-title
Series Title: Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics
Title
Copyright: Mirowski, Philip (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Dedication & Epigraph
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
1. The fearful spheres of Pascal & Parmenides
2. Everything an economist needs to know about physics but was probably afraid to ask: The history of the energy concept
Energy before “energy”
Live force & dead force
The motive force of fire
The Laplacian Dream
Some mathematics of conservation principles
The “discovery” of the conservation of energy
Mayer
Joule
Helmholtz
Colding
What was discovered?
The energetics movement
Entropy: More heat than light
The awakening from the Laplacian Dream
The theory of relativity
Quantum mechanics
Who’s afraid of the nonconservation of energy?
3. Body, motion, & value
The discovery of energy conservation rechauffe
Measurement, mammon, momentum, and man
Darwinian evolution as metaphor
Lineamentrics from Stevin to Whewell
Energy as metaphoric synthesis
Physics off the gold standard
4. Science & substance theories of value in political economy to 1870
The metaphor of value
Aristotle discovers the economy
Two kinds of mercantilism
Physiocracy: More wheat than Zeit
Smith & Say: Cartesian crossroads
Ricardian vices
Karl Marx & the swan song of substance theories of value
The watershed
Entr'acte
5. Neoclassical economic theory: An irresistable field of force meets an immovable object
Classical political economy: Paradoxes of motion
Precursors without energy: Canard, Bentham, Cournot
Hermann Gossen & the transition to neoclassical economics
The marginalist revolution of the 1870s
The canonical neoclassical model
Some consequences of a field theory of value
The utility field
The law of one price
Equilibrium
The sciences were never at war?
Walras, Jevons, Menger
Marshall: More discreet than right
Neoclassical economics as a species of energetics
The syndetic stage?
The imperatives of proto-energetics
6. The corruption of the field metaphor, & the retrogression to substance theories of value: Neoclassical production theory
A dyybuk named production
Putting square pegs in round holes: Flirting with the conservation of matter
Getting more and more out of less and less: The neoclassical production metaphors
The spurious symmetry of neoclassical theories of production and consumption
The myth of the engineering production function
Abandoning the field
Every man his own capital theorist
Has there been any progress in the theory of value in the 20th century?
7. The ironies of physics envy
Is economics a science?
Rediscovering the field: Integrability & revealed preference
The integrability problem & the misunderstood conservation principles
The age of technique
Paul Samuelson, scientist
Why did neoclassical economics cease to seriously emulate modern physical theory?
Reprise: The underworld of social physics
8. Universal history is the story of different intonations given to a handful of metaphors
Appendix: The mathematics of the Lagrangian & Hamiltonian formalisms
Notes
1. The fearful spheres…
2. Everything an economist needs to know…
3. Body, motion, & value
4. Science & substance theories…
5. Neoclassical economic theory…
6. The corruption…
7. The ironies…
Bibliography
Index
