The Effortless Economy of Science?
Philip Mirowski
Duke University Press
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. <p>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 <i>The Effortless Economy of Science?</i>
 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.</p>