astronomy

Philip Mirowski

Philip Mirowski is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Philip Mirowski rather than just read about it. In short: Philip Mirowski (born 21 August 1951 in Jackson, Michigan) is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979.

Key takeaways

Philip Mirowski belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Philip Mirowski to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Philip Mirowski from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Philip Mirowski (born 21 August 1951 in Jackson, Michigan) is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979.

Career In his 1989 book More Heat than Light, Mirowski reveals a history of how physics has drawn inspiration from economics and how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. He traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics, the modern orthodox theory. Mirowski's thesis has been challenged by Hal Varian and defended, with some reservations, by D. Wade Hands. Machine Dreams explores the historical influences of the military and the cyborg sciences on neoclassical economics. The neglected influence of John von Neumann and his theory of automata are key themes throughout the book. Mirowski claims that many of the developments in neoclassical economics in the 20th century, from game theory to computational economics, are the unacknowledged result of von Neumann's plans for economics. The work expands Mirowski's vision for a computational economics, one in which various market types are constructed in a similar fashion to Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. The role of economics is to explore how various market types perform in measures of complexity and efficiency, with more complicated markets being able to incorporate the effects of the less complex. By complexity Mirowski means something analogous to computational complexity theory in computer science. Mirowski's criticism of game theory is noted by financial economist and historian Peter L. Bernstein. In his book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, Mirowski concludes that neoliberal thought has become so pervasive that any countervailing evidence serves only to further convince disciples of its ultimate truth. Once neoliberalism became a Theory of Everything, providing a revolutionary account of self, knowledge, information, markets, and government, it could no longer be falsified by anything as trifling as data from the "real" economy.

Books

As author The Birth of the Business Cycle. New York: Garland Press, 1985, ISBN 9781138858176. Against Mechanism: Protecting Economics from Science. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8476-7436-7. More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics. Cambridge University Press, 1989, ISBN 0-521-42689-8. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-521-77526-4. The Effortless Economy of Science? Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, (papers 463 pp.) ISBN 0-8223-3310-4. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Harvard University Press, 2011, ISBN 9780674046467. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso Books, 2013, ISBN 9781781680797. The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: A History of Information and Knowledge in Economics (with E. Nik-Khah). Oxford University Press, 2017, ISBN 9780190270056.

As editor (editor) Edgeworth's Writings on Chance, Probability and Statistics (1994) (editor) Natural Images in Economics: Markets Read in Tooth and Claw (1994) (editor) The Collected Economic Works of William Thomas Thornton (1999) (editor with E. Sent) Science Bought and Sold (2001) (co-edited with R. van Horn and T. Stapleford) Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program (2011) Philip Mirowski; Dieter Plehwe, eds. (2009). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (PDF). Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674033184. OCLC 257554337. OCLC 748925780 Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe and Quinn Slobodian, Eds., (2020) Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, London, New York: Verso, ISBN 978-1-78873-255-0, (ebook version [1])

Notes

External links Homepage of Philip Mirowski A long review of Machine Dreams at the Wayback Machine (archived May 27, 2009). Review by Steven N. Durlauf of Mirowski's book The Effortless Economy of Science? S. Abu Turab Rizvi: Philip Mirowski as a Historian of Economic Thought. In: Steven G. Medema, Warren J. Samuels (eds.): Historians of Economics and Economic Thought: The Construction of Disciplinary Memory. Routledge, London/New York 2001, pp. 209–222. Don Ross, The Effortless Economy of Science?, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 60, Iss. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 659–65.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Philip Mirowski

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Philip Mirowski claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Philip Mirowski before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Philip Mirowski ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Philip Mirowski

In research: Philip Mirowski appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Philip Mirowski in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Philip Mirowski is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1951 births, 21st-century American historians, 21st-century American male writers, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Philip Mirowski outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Philip Mirowski in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Philip Mirowski means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Philip Mirowski out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Philip Mirowski in simple terms?

Why does Philip Mirowski matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Philip Mirowski?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Philip Mirowski.