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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: Mirowski's argument is that economists as it is practiced today is simply thermodynamics circa-1855. The neoclassical notion of "utility" is the thermodynamic notion of potential energy, which is a version of the vis viva of Kant. The Laplacian dream of a perfectly mathematizable, atomic world is preserved, as if mummified, in economics even though the mathematics (and the physics) is nearly 150 years old. Mirowski goes back to Adam Smith and notes that in Smith there is the same dream of a "social physics," except that Smith understood physics more as Cartesian vortices than Newtonian gravity. Mirowski has a very interesting story to tell, the basic problem is that he mixes it with his own homegrown theory of Western Civilization that only confuses the basic argument. The equation of body-motion-energy may or may not be a central motif in economic history, but that argument is separate from the very interesting story of economics as social physics. Too bad he didn't save his little pet theory for another book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: Mirowski's argument is that economists as it is practiced today is simply thermodynamics circa-1855. The neoclassical notion of "utility" is the thermodynamic notion of potential energy, which is a version of the vis viva of Kant. The Laplacian dream of a perfectly mathematizable, atomic world is preserved, as if mummified, in economics even though the mathematics (and the physics) is nearly 150 years old. Mirowski goes back to Adam Smith and notes that in Smith there is the same dream of a "social physics," except that Smith understood physics more as Cartesian vortices than Newtonian gravity. Mirowski has a very interesting story to tell, the basic problem is that he mixes it with his own homegrown theory of Western Civilization that only confuses the basic argument. The equation of body-motion-energy may or may not be a central motif in economic history, but that argument is separate from the very interesting story of economics as social physics. Too bad he didn't save his little pet theory for another book.
Rating: 
Summary: A DAUNTING MASTERPIECE
Review: Mirowski's incredible work deserves better than a 1000-word review by a layman. And yet the reviews of other economists have often been inept and misleading. (When a scholar allows a major mistake to see print, that's regarded as a pretty serious intellectual shortcoming. But there's a worse one. Accusing a scholar of making a major mistake he didn't actually commit. That's essentially what the well-known economist Hal Varian did in his review.)As a history of the energy concept, MORE makes for facinating if demanding reading. An interest in economics is not at all required for that section of the book. Anyone with a little curiosity about physics and its history will be intrigued. When it comes to criticizing neoclassical economics, Mirowski is in a class by himself. Witty but substantive zingers abound. Zingers that can't be dismissed as mere rhetorical potshots. The grace and depth of MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT readily justify the effort required to finish it. Still, for laymen unwilling to tackle Mirowski, there is a pale substitute. Paul Ormerod's [spelling?] THE DEATH OF ECONOMICS. That's a breezy critique of neoclassical doctrine aimed at the general reader. Whether you plan to ever look at it or not, buy Mirowski's book NOW. Forget rave reviews -- what he really deserves (to strike the proper, academic note)is your money.
Rating:
Summary: Update
Review: Since having reviewed this book in September 1999, I was inspired by it to resolve Mirowski's Thesis in a recent paper called 'The Futility of Utility' (Physica A,2000). My resolution shows that both Varian and Mirowski were partly wrong. Mirowski is right in one sense: when dynamics is taken into account in the theory of production then the generic case (nonintegrable dynamics) is that utility is a path-dependent functional, and so doesn't exist mathematically as a function of demand. In this case (as Osborne observed from empirical data) price as a function of demand does not exist (the 'cartoons' passing as graphs in Samuelson's textbook can't be constructed from real market data). Varian was wrong: the most trivial integrability conditions are violated in this case because utility as a function cannot be postulated but either exists or doesn't according to dynamics. On the other hand, Mirowski was wrong that an analog of kinetic energy, or even a conserved quantity, is required. Utility is not, as Mirowski believed, analogous to potential energy: it is analogous to what physicists call the action. When optimization-control dynamics (Hamiltonian dynamics in econometrics) is integrable, then the action is a function, not merely a path-dependent functional (see Liouville's integrability theorem, ca. 1880, also discussed in 1916 by Einstein in the context of why Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization fails).
Rating:
Summary: Imaginary worlds of theory
Review: This fascinating upgrage of the author's earlier _Against Mechanism_ gives a severe account of the state of mathematical economics as it has been since the marginalist revolution. It is a reminder that mathematical technique and basic modeling are two separate activities and that understanding what it is that one is attempting to make into a science is not so easy. It is probably true no deterministic mathematical science of any type known is possible in a medium involving human consciousness. Yet the obsession to treat these different domains of discourse as analogous to physics or amenable to predictive science via the apparatus of differential equations simply refuses to die. It is a peculiar history, that some very good mathematicians of the nineteenth century, who understood the physics, found bizarre at the start, before the bad habits of phantom thinking became institutionalized. Mirowski's expose of the whole game is priceless, and almost unnerving. Hm, ideology perhaps Very important book.
Rating:
Summary: Theoretical economics as pseudo-physics
Review: This is an amazing book! It exposes what is hidden in Samuelson and every other economics text, namely, that the theory of equilibria and utility were merely lifted from physics (Hamiltonian dynamics) without any support from economic data. What is more amazing is the complete discussion presented by the author that `utility' doesn't exist mathematically because the required differential form is nonintegrable. Economists and statisticians may not be able to undestand this point, but it should be familiar to researchers in dynamical systems theory. The inventors of marginal utility theory, Fisher, Walras, and Pareto, literally did not know enough mathematics to know what they were talking about. Equilibrium can't be reached in a Hamilton system (there is no friction to permit the approach to equilibrium), but this contradiction was no worse than all the others inherent in econo-pseudophysics. This book should be read and understood by every economics student who reads Samuelson and asks: what has 'utility' to do with the data. A very good complementary book is Osborne's "The stock market from a physicist's viewpoint". Osborne introduced tha idea of lognormal stock prices (thereby paving the way for the Black-Scholes equation and derivatives trading). In his first two chapters, without the benefit of the historic perspective offered by Mirowski, Osborne explains why the supply-demand curves drawn by Samuelson are wrong and misleading, and then goes on to illustrate how one could obtain correct discrete plots real data. For example: if 25 tomatoes are available (supply) then what's the price? Clearly, there is no answer. Price does not exist as a function of supply, nor of demand (nonuniqueness). Osborne goes on to suggest that the three related assumptions of equilibrium, continous price changes and efficiency are not supported by the data, and observes that there are traders who make money out of the inefficiency of the market. Mirowski and Osborne are strongly recommended to anyone who wants to understand economics.
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