More Heat Than Light

More Heat Than Light PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.

More Heat Than Light

More Heat Than Light PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426893
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
The development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the emergence of neoclassical economics are traced to reveal how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value.

Against Mechanism

Against Mechanism PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742569616
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
'...the history of economic theory at its best.'-EASTERN ECONOMIC JOURNAL

More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics

More Heat than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy, and Economics PDF Author: Jeremy Walker
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811539367
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book traces the interacting histories of the disciplines of ecology and economics, from their common origin in the ancient Greek concept of oikonomia, through their distinct encounters with energy physics, to the current obstruction of neoliberal economics to responses to the ecological and climate crisis of the so-called Anthropocene. Reconstructing their constitution as separate sciences in the era of fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism, the book offers an explanation of how the ecological sciences have moved from a position of critical collision with mainstream economics in the 1970s, to one of collusion with the project of permanent growth, in and through the thermal crisis of the biosphere.

Non-natural Social Science

Non-natural Social Science PDF Author: Neil De Marchi
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822314103
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Published in 1989, Philip Mirowski's More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physic's as Nature's Economics offered a challenge to historians of economics that could not be ignored. Neo-classical economics, he said, adopted certain analytical tools of mid-nineteenth-century physics, simply substituting "utility" for "energy," and in so doing, chose a natural-world model which denied that economic knowledge might be essentially social and cultural. The essays in this collection represent the first collective effort to respond to Mirowski's challenge by examining and assessing the Mirowski enterprise. In addition to questioning the veracity of the connection between physics and economics, the contributors consider the far-reaching implications of Mirowski's thesis for the history of economics. Mirowski shows that economic texts must be viewed in their relation to texts outside the field of economics and offers an alternative reading of economic texts as social and cultural inscriptions. As historians of economics respond to Mirowski's challenge, the style and direction of their work will be changed. Utlimately, a careful assessment of More Heat Than Light may introduce historians of economics to recognize that the "discipline" of economics may not be the most appropriate category from which to proceed. Contributors. Jack Birner, Marcel Boumans, A. W. Coats, Avi J. Cohen, I. Bernard Cohen, Neil de Marchi, Steve Fuller, Clifford G. Gaddy, Wade Hands, Albert Jolink, Arjo Klamer, Robert Leonard, Philip Mirowski, Theodore M. Porter, Margaret Schabas, E. Roy Weintraub

Machine Dreams

Machine Dreams PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521775267
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 674

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Book Description
This is the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents, arguing that neoclassical economics has participated in the deconstruction of the integral 'self'. Finally, it argues for an alliance of computational and institutional themes, and challenges the widespread impression that there is nothing else besides American neoclassical economic theory left standing after the demise of Marxism.

Heat and Light

Heat and Light PDF Author: Jennifer Haigh
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062199080
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart—a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.

More Heat Than Light

More Heat Than Light PDF Author: Philip Mirowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781107714564
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
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.

Light without Heat

Light without Heat PDF Author: David Carroll Simon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723413
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In Light without Heat, David Carroll Simon argues for the importance of carelessness to the literary and scientific experiments of the seventeenth century. While scholars have often looked to this period in order to narrate the triumph of methodical rigor as a quintessentially modern intellectual value, Simon describes the appeal of open-ended receptivity to the protagonists of the New Science. In straying from the work of self-possession and the duty to sift fact from fiction, early modern intellectuals discovered the cognitive advantages of the undisciplined mind. Exploring the influence of what he calls the "observational mood" on both poetry and prose, Simon offers new readings of Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Izaak Walton, Henry Power, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. He also extends his inquiry beyond the boundaries of early modernity, arguing for a literary theory that trades strict methodological commitment for an openness to lawless drift.

From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics

From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics PDF Author: Ben Fine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134099363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Is or has economics ever been the imperial social science? Could or should it ever be so? These are the central concerns of this book. It involves a critical reflection on the process of how economics became the way it is, in terms of a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, that has, nonetheless, increasingly directed its attention to appropriating the subject matter of other social sciences through the process termed "economics imperialism". In other words, the book addresses the shifting boundaries between economics and the other social sciences as seen from the confines of the dismal science, with some reflection on the responses to the economic imperialists by other disciplines. Significantly, an old economics imperialism is identified of the "as if market" style most closely associated with Gary Becker, the public choice theory of Buchanan and Tullock and cliometrics. But this has given way to a more "revolutionary" form of economics imperialism associated with the information-theoretic economics of Akerlof and Stiglitz, and the new institutional economics of Coase, Wiliamson and North. Embracing one "new" field after another, economics imperialism reaches its most extreme version in the form of "freakonomics", the economic theory of everything on the basis of the most shallow principles. By way of contrast and as a guiding critical thread, a thorough review is offered of the appropriate principles underpinning political economy and its relationship to social science, and how these have been and continue to be deployed. The case is made for political economy with an interdisciplinary character, able to bridge the gap between economics and other social sciences, and draw upon and interrogate the nature of contemporary capitalism.

More Light, Less Heat

More Light, Less Heat PDF Author: Joseph Phelps
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 9780787942861
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
So often the call to dialogue masks a requirement that we set aside our deepest convictions on important questions. This book should be required reading for everyone who is about to enter into a potentially divisive debate. ?Richard Mouw, president, Fuller Theological Seminary This breakthrough guide introduces a powerful armistice for those battling the Christian culture war??Dialogue.' As a basic healing practice, dialogue enables people to discuss issues and disagreements in ways that allow them to learn from each other without attempting to demonize or convert the other's thinking. Dialogue enables Christians at the grassroots level to effectively speak for themselves and listen deeply to each other, discussing fundamental disagreements in open, constructive, and mutually respectful ways. Pinpointing what separates the Christian left and right, More Light, Less Heat provides the tools individuals need to constructively engage in dialogue, demonstrating how participants can strengthen their arguments and bring forth a mutual understanding of their adversaries. In ways that will decrease the isolation and anxiety that often accompanies such faith-based debates, the author offers clear and concrete models to help participants better articulate their beliefs while understanding the beliefs of others.