Economics, Econometrics and the Link: Essays in Honor of Lawrence R. Klein Book

Thermodynamics as ideology

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Snarky, damning, mostly unbearable (Mirowski's signature), and for all the sneering, deeply depressing review of economics as an intellectual discipline. With physics cutting an even more sorry figure. What's new in fact is not that economics is definetively proved to be sloppy, clunky and irrational - which any undergraduate can experience first hand - but that physics is no better.

An obsession with the cultural idea (in the anthropological sense) of closed systems sustains the development of a host of apparently purely technical and rational theoretical devices such as double entry accounting and the first 'law' of thermodynamics and - by now I'm sure - many other apparatuses (Foucault is evoked but his approach to knowledge analysis not applied, as Mirowski's critique is self-contained in the discipline's lineages, or in his own words, 'internalist'). The obsession translates into an unquenchable thirst for conservation principles, whereby the 'active' elements of the rigorously closed system MUST be offset by equivalent 'passive' elements, and the sum of the two MUST equal zero. Potential energy is offset by kinetic energy, debts by credits, and even in the body - turned by Harvey into a closed system - the blood created is always offset by the blood consumed.

Mirowski calls this the body/motion/value metaphorical 'simplex' (as opposed to Eisenhower's military- industrial 'complex'?). Very charitably, and in anti-Foucauldian terms, he posits it as a heuristics, i.e. a tool for developing knowledge.

But knowledge tends to be useful. Mirowski looks the other way, only interested in theories' internal architecture. If neoclassical economics' architecture is not self-sustaining, clearly there must be some external force shoring it up. Politics is out of the question for Mirowski in 1989. But never has usefulness been a sin for thermodynamics or physics in general, as Joule or Carnot's stories confirm. If thermodynamics was the science of industrialization, able to harness a type of energy eventually independent from nature's whims, 'sunshine bottled up', what was this flawed science of value supposed to accomplish?

Mirowski does not ask, busy as he is proving that economics' borrowing of notions and formulas from proto-energetics was incomplete, unsteady and ultimately a total failure. But his envy for the handsome salaries earned by neoclassical quants is evidence that it was actually a huge political success.