More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics

Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

by Philip Mirowski

This is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. The author 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.

Genres: Economics, History, Science, Nonfiction, Physics, Philosophy, History Of Science

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Philip Mirowski (born 21 August 1951, Jackson, Michigan) is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame (Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science). He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979, and is a Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values.

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's amazing that economics departments everywhere weren't delegated to a sub-discipline of psychology after this book was published.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jayesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mirowski is a fun writer. Describing Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson's work in Economics as:

High mathematical rigor is regularly forced to cohabit with low semantic comedy.

requires some chutzpah.

Despite this I can't say it's an easy read for everyone, there is a bunch of math and technical discussion which may not make as much sense without the appropriate background. Intuitively some of the things do make sense. However coming from multi-agent systems literature people are now more aware of non-transitive relationships, path dependence in optimization and "alternative" equilibria to better characterize actual agent behaviors so would love to know find out what effect the book had on the Economics community and if things have changed at the ground level now.

[L. A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting at times despite being aimed at someone with more of a modern econ background than myself. The intellectual history was fascinating but commentary that structured it wasn't that great in my opinion, for several reasons. The simplest is that he doesn't actually know the modern science he's talking about well enough to not make important mistakes with his claims, such as the claim that integrability of a dynamical system and the conservation of energy are equivalent and therefore that chaotic dynamics preclude the conservation of energy. These are less important IMO since they only appear vital for arguments that I don't think are that valuable or interesting in the first place.

Mirowski is interested primarily in uncovering some grand family of analogy in the sciences relating energy to value and also to the life sciences in some way, perhaps akin to an Umberto Eco protagonist. I dont think this is that valuable or useful, beyond something fairly specific which I think is important. He often goes on and on about the various ways in which certain ideas began to enter into the common scholarly consciousness, for example conservation of energy or using ideas from mechanics to cast utility as a potential energy. He is never very specific about how this occurs beyond descriptions of people with business interests attending lectures in mechanics, and how these ideas seem to come from multiple places at once in certain epochs also doesnt appear to be that interesting to him beyond noting the inaptness of these important concepts having a single "discoverer" who came up with a neat explanation whole cloth.

I believe that these segments house a very interesting portion of the book. Essentially, I would claim that Mirwoski has unwittingly engaged in an exposition of bourgeois science. He described the the mechanisms by which scientific investigations (made possible by the support of the bourgeois with the idea that the advances will prove to be valuable in some way, and in fact were) which themselves took on a bourgeois ideological character in their foundational metaphors, are in turn recuperated more directly by the bourgeoisie into an exposition of a thoroughly bourgeois conception of the economy. By borrowing from energy physics, itself cast in terms of seeking Perfection and coming closer to god, neoclassical economics was able to present the function of markets as proceeding along this same trajectory. He very neatly describes how the various people involved were in social circles that were connected, either personally or indirectly, by their bourgeois character. Someone was a physician, someone else owned a brewery, a further person was supposed to take over a business, and so on. This is the sort of phenomenon that many Marxists talk about without always feeling the need to develop it in detail (probably because it's painstaking work) and seeing it all laid out like this was interesting.

Mirowsky even touches on some vague elements of this himself. He indicates that there are political reasons why this neoclassical vision of markets as rocketing out society to the perfection of being perched atop a maximum is important to defend, but doesn't make it an important point. Presumably now that a neoliberal conception of markets as the ultimate computer in existence is gaining steam it will end up being possible to dispense with convex optimization but who knows I guess.

Anyway, it was a fun read, politically very interesting at times and at others quite dull.

[X · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Let us begin by admitting that there exists no scientific method, no set of timeless criteria that the program of economic research could adopt and embrace in order to guarantee its own scientific status and legitimacy.”
 
I love when someone has a Grand Theory and isn’t afraid to share it, and that’s where Mirowski is at with this book. Published in 1989, his Grand Theory is this: the entire logical structure of neoclassical economics (which is to say - basically all Western mainstream economics) is based on 19th century physics theories about “energy” and “energetics” which are (a) logically inconsistent (if not just totally irrelevant) in an economic context and (b) no longer even accepted theories within physics itself; however, neoclassical economists have been so successful at using their supposed “scientific-ness” to drown out any other economic voices that essentially the entire field of study has been trapped in a theoretical cul-de-sac for more than a century.
 
I’ll say it upfront - Mirowski is preaching to the choir here. I studied econ in undergrad and to some extent in grad school, and I would tell the freshmen I was tutoring “do NOT try to understand the logic of econ theories - if you do you will fail the class because they don’t make sense. Getting an A is about understanding the weird little headspace of the weird little guys who invented, say, indifference curves, and then answering the questions on the test as though you, like them, will do whatEVER it takes to make it seem as though those weird little ideas could possibly make some kind of sense.” (Why, then, did I study econ? In the words of Veronica Mars herself, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never is, but always to be blest” etc.)
 
Furthermore, one of Mirowski’s biggest critiques of economists is that they don’t understand the mathematical implications of the theories they’ve smuggled over from physics (and he includes numerous examples of this, including a very funny back-and-forth between economist Walras and mathematician Laurent circa 1900, where after Laurent made several very friendly attempts to ask Walras about the mathematical assumptions on which his economic theories relied, “Walras started suggesting to others that Laurent was part of a plot against him”); meanwhile, I didn’t even *try* to understand the math Mirowski gets into. I will freely admit I have done abstract algebra before in my life and didn’t especially enjoy it, and no number of discussions about field theory (and this book had many!) will get me to spend any more of my precious time on this earth working through it. (For what it’s worth, I think one good conversation with someone who understands field theory would have been all I needed to understand that part of Mirowski’s argument; conversely, I don’t think my choice to take all the equations as “good enough” significantly impacted the reading experience, because so much of what Mirowski’s arguing isn’t really about that.)
 
That said, one of the reasons I was intrigued by this book is that despite having had a lot of fun with economics (in the same way that it’s fun to look at medieval illuminations of animals), I have always both (a) hated physics, and (b) been very, very bad at it. So I was interested to see how exactly the author was going to link the concepts in those two fields, which I had never thought of before as being similar.
 
THE THESIS
 
Mirowski makes his case by focusing on what scientists - science enthusiasts, I guess - were theorizing in the 1800s, in particular their ideas about “energy” as the fundamental force (or substance, or - something) in the universe. At the time, they had this idea that the universe was totally explainable - that somehow through scientific inquiry they would be able to discover a set of natural rules, or equations, or ideas that could explain and predict everything in existence at once. He breaks down the way “energy” was conceptualized into three categories - (1) energy as body/substance, (2) energy as motion, and (3) energy as value - and then goes on to show how “the dominant schools of Western economic thought – classical political economy, neoclassical economics, and Marxian economics” began adopting various parts of this theoretical structure, including (but only implicitly!) the idea of the “law” of conservation of energy, to conceptualize economic value.
 
A. VALUE
 
Essentially, what started as a substance theory of economic value (value is embodied in the commodity through the production process, e.g., based on the amount of labor involved; is constant during exchange/trade, a function which adds no economic value; finally, is dissipated through consumption) morphed into a field theory of economic value, which I am not even going to attempt to explain mathematically but which essentially equates to the idea of value as defined through utility/preferences, where utility is conceptualized as a field that has certain mathematical properties.
 
Yes, we all know that utility as an economic concept is just somebody waving their hand and saying “don’t worry about it, it’s a made-up theory that’s based on nothing and is totally impossible to measure and we have no reason to believe any of our assumptions about its properties are valid - but stay with me!” Mirowski says a lot about why this is extremely dumb. (For example, if you’re interested in a play-by-play about why Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson is wrong about everything he’s ever said or done, you’re going to love this book! E.g., “The key to the comprehension of Samuelson‘s meteoric rise in the economic profession was his knack for evoking only outward trappings and ornament of science without ever once coming to grips with the actual content or implications of physical theory for his neoclassical economics.”) In particular, he spends a lot of time going over why he doesn’t believe that utility actually fits the properties of a field, and therefore why the central idea of neoclassical economics is a total nonstarter.  A few of the general takeaways: (1) the utility model ignores the significance of the production process because there is no analogous process for “energy” as a physical concept, (2) you need to assume path-independence for the utility model to work, but you really can’t, and (3) the particular “energy” metaphor they’re using inevitably implies the concept of conservation of energy… but that concept doesn’t really work in a utility-focused/economic context. In other words, the metaphor doesn’t make sense.
 
As opposed to, frankly, most economists, Mirowski is committed to the idea that you can’t just handwave away the details. If you make a claim (“value is like energy”), you have to be willing to follow the logic through. If you make an analogy, you have to be willing to look at whether it actually holds up. (At one point Mirowski lists out a bunch of econ academic journal article titles that reference physics/math/biology terms and I laughed out loud because I’ve *read* that kind of thing and they never, ever unpack the comparison, it is always just about trying to draft off the legitimacy of “hard” science rather than doing actual work.)
 
B. SCIENCE
 
So if the metaphor doesn’t make sense, why use it? Well, it rose to prevalence at a time when “scientific methods” were becoming the paragon: “As the natural sciences rose in general esteem, the claims for the efficacy of the methods of science became increasingly strident. For Smith, the essence of science was the evocation of order, wonder, and intellectual delight; it was primarily an aesthetic response. For Ricardo, it was an assertion of rigid adherence to the canons of a proto-mathematical logic, the dictates of which overruled any casual empiricism or sentimentality. For Marx, science was the main motor of economic advance as well as the only instrument capable of piercing the veil of ideology. The escalation of the dependence upon science and its purported methods as a source of legitimacy for economic research had reached such a plateau by the mid-nineteenth century that John Stuart Mill, the paragon of late classical economics, could maintain in his System of Logic that the methods of research deployed in economics should be identical to those already in use in astronomy.”
 
(When I read that sentence I had a flashback to reading that exact line in a college poli sci class - and finding it just as laughable then as I do now. The reference reminds me of a passage in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, where he described a lullaby that described counting the stars and the clouds - but pointed out that counting the stars and counting the clouds are two fundamentally different tasks. That is, you can count the stars - but what even is a cloud? Where does it begin and end? What would the purpose of “counting” clouds be, versus using any other form of measurement to consider them? An analogy - physics is the stars, and economics is the clouds. And neoclassical economists are pointing up at the sky and going, “one… two…” and being handed a check.)
 
Okay, so economists decided to hijack the structure of the 19th century “energy” concept(s), using 19th century physics comparisons to make themselves sound more scientific - and not just scientific, but specifically scientific in the language of an era that believed in not just the possibility but the worthiness of total certainty about, and therefore total control over, the natural world. (“Above all, neoclassicals appropriated the physics metaphor in order to appropriate its scientific legitimacy: the image of the mathematical comprehension of the deterministic laws of a stable external world.”)
 
Mirowski doesn’t argue that this was done cynically at first - there certainly exists a desire in the social sciences to be able to fall back on an overarching theory of society that implies stability, or at least the possibility of progress toward stability, and it makes sense that this kind of “there is a set of natural rules that govern all human (economic) behavior, and a clear reason for the upheavals of our history and future” claim would appeal to many people, no matter how wrong it is. (Cf. Marxism.) Mirowski is much less sympathetic, however, toward people making these claims recently: “Perhaps one is forgiven if one wonders just how many times the wheel can be reinvented and the results attributed to rationality. Probably the answer is that it will continue on into the indefinite future, because neither the scientists nor the neoclassical economists will be willing to face up to the nature of their theoretical practices.” (This continues to be the case despite the influx of mathematicians and physicists and engineers into economics because they have only been able to bring over with them mathematical techniques, never theoretical improvements. Mirowski argues that this is because if you get rid of the faulty utility-energy metaphor, there is nothing left holding neoclassical economic theory together… and, uh, no reason to keep employing neoclassical economists… so said neoclassical economists have focused major “revanchist” efforts on keeping that metaphor around and on discouraging or shouting down any other theoretical approaches. (One interesting hiccup - the way that Keynes did a sort of half-effective end-run around this through his incorporation of national income into his theory, i.e., actual data!)
 
This book was published in 1989, but it feels like using a “scientific” smokescreen to justify claims that make absolutely no sense once you think about them for more than a second has just become more and more common. …Which I guess is a good segue into the next topic.
 
C. TEXTBOOKS
 
As established, my economics education - by all accounts a fairly standard one within American institutions of higher education - focused largely on the exact theories that this book discredits. These theories were taught not just as though they were orthodox, but as though no other reasonable way of understanding economics even existed.
 
I found it fascinating, therefore, the prominence that Mirowski gives to *textbooks* in showing how and why economics developed the way that it did.
 
Essentially, what he argues is this: these economists did not just hijack a physics concept that seemed “intuitively” right to them - they hijacked an *already outdated* physics concept, an understanding of “energy” that is solely what they would have learned when they were in school (for a 19th century definition of school), and then completely failed to do any basic research to see if those concepts they thought were so “scientific” had been further developed, or rebutted, or were otherwise no longer considered accurate by the scientific community as it existed. On Ricardo, for example: “we encounter for the first time (but not the last) a new phenomenon in political economy: a zealot, intent on raising the scientific status of political economy who himself possessed little or no familiarity with either the contemporary practices of scientists or the history of the sciences. […] Ricardo‘s tragedy was that he was at the mercy of an image of science, derived from his predecessors, an image glimpsed through a glass darkly because of his own remote familiarity with ‘science.’” Mirowski points out, “this increased dependence upon science had a number of perverse side effects. The first was that the more fervent the invocation of science by political economists, the correspondingly lesser were their efforts in delineating precisely in what those methods consisted, or in finding out what it was that contemporary scientists actually did.” Oops! And of course if that’s what you’re doing (i.e., never thinking critically again), the role of what you know based on the specific textbooks & concepts you were taught with takes on an outsize influence over your understanding of the world.
 
And on the other end of things - Mirowski talks about how 20th century economics textbooks consistently present neoclassical economics, utility as energy/field and all, as *the* accurate and accepted economic doctrine while skipping over all of its many fatal flaws. I can personally confirm this has continued to be the case right through into the 21st century.
 
This is part of a bigger point about education, and particularly education *about* science and *about* history and *about* theory: early on, Mirowski writes, “The reason that there is altogether too much loose talk about ‘science’ among social theorists is that there has been too little history of science in their diets. If so much revolves around the question of scientific legitimacy, then let us grit our teeth and learn a little about what it meant to participate in the project of attempting to render the physical world intelligible. I guarantee that afterward nothing will ever seem the same.” (I think about the Stats classes I had to take in college and grad school, consistently the worse-taught classes of my entire education, and about just how easy it would have been to make them interesting in the smallest bit of history had been incorporated. On a similar note, I found fascinating the role Mirowski gives double-entry accounting in the development of ideas surrounding scientific method - apparently it was imported to England from Italy, and became big in particular for breweries because of the precision with which they needed to track the production and sales/delivery process. Joule - yep, the Joule of joules, that Joule! - apparently worked at a brewery. Fun fact!)
 
Mirowski justifiably emphasizes the academia career perspective on why neoclassical economic theory has continued to be so prominent (“Yet from the vantage point that comprehends the brute necessity of the nineteenth-century physics metaphor for the very identity of the neoclassical research program, it appears that economics has been the most rigidly doctrinaire of all the social sciences. It has ruthlessly barred any discussion of the legitimacy of a social physics, and yet paradoxically preserved itself from any contamination by subsequent intellectual developments in twentieth-century physics, all the while basking in the general impression that neoclassical economics was more scientific than sister disciplines such as sociology or anthropology”) - but I also think it’s a testament to the ease with which the “default” way of thinking can get perpetuated across generations, even when it makes absolutely no sense, if people are not taught to ask themselves *why* they’re thinking what they’re thinking. The extent to which economics has tried to “science-ify” itself toward physics and math and away from other social sciences goes to show many economists’ fundamental unwillingness to prioritize the pursuit of any kind of truth: “neoclassicals have wavered between claiming that they were describing actual behavior and claiming that they were prescribing what actual behavior should be. Their contempt for psychology has always given the lie to the first claim, so of necessity they have eventually retreated to the second. This second position is untenable, however, because it conflicts with the ideology of the scientist as detached and value-neutral observer as it commits the transgression of defining rationality in a post-hoc manner in order to conform to the mathematical model of utility.” …Needless to say, that skill set is not taught in probably 99% of econ classes in the US. (And if that number seems high, remember how many students take Econ 101 and then tap out there.)
 
D. GOOD ECON
 
Look, there is some “good” economic work being done out there. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this work is totally disconnected from the economic theory that econ students are taught in school and that many economists regularly repeat in vague terms, but instead stems from - wait for it! - research into actual economic activity. For example, Mirowski describes a very funny speech by Mandelbrot, who essentially came up with the math around fractals, about the link between his research, physics, and economics as a field of study: Mandelbrot apparently noted that “[i]n the history of economics, there has existed a small but significant band of innovators of mathematical techniques and theories who drew their inspiration directly from social and economic phenomena, and whose mathematical techniques and models subsequently turned out to be useful in a physics context. He cited the work of Bachelier (1900) on stock prices as random walks, which anticipated Einstein‘s 1905 model of Brownian motion, and R.A. Fisher’s 1922 invention of probability amplitudes, which later became central to quantum mechanics, in the context of his work on eugenics [:/] and crop variations. Mandelbrot suggested that his own work was another example of that tradition, claiming that fractals had found application in physics only some years after he had generated them to deal with descriptions of economic phenomena. In a querulous aside, Mandelbrot then said: Wouldn’t you expect that economists would find it a source of pride that techniques tailored to economic concepts were generated by economists for the express purpose of economic analysis? But no, he said with some bitterness, that had not ever been the case in this particular tradition. His predicament had been explained to him by an eminent orthodox economist as follows: No mathematical technique ever becomes prominent in orthodox (read, neoclassical) economic theory without having first proved itself in physics.”
 
The hard part, I think, is separating the wheat from the chaff. As Mirowski points out, theory is what organizes and guides a field’s research program, so if you don’t have a useful theory, the research necessarily suffers. Imagine what could be done if people didn’t have to wade through miles of extraneous & irrational information before they even begin.

[João Ritto · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you'll allow me the, grantedly undeserved, pretentiousness of being a deconstructionist of the post-modernist scientific deconstruction project, a question hovering in the air still waiting to be answered is why the writers of books in this style are often so unbearably arrogant. Mirowski is no exception, I read a review that quipped "Mirowski's hatred of neoclassical economics borders on the pathological: one sometimes wonders if his mother didn't run off with a neoclassical economist, leaving little Phil bereft in the cradle".

Having said that, once one gets over the style (which includes some moments of pure speculation about some of the early neoclassicals' lack of understanding of physics based only on Mirowski's tendency to assume that everyone else is dumb while he is the God-given genius we need but fail to appreciate), there is much food for thought in this book. The main point of the book - that neoclassical economics represented a discountinuous break from classical economics, which started with economists such as Jevons and Walras trying to emulate energy physics of mid 19th century, pretty much through copying the mathematical arsenal it used a bit carelessly - is well established with quite convincing evidence. Mirowski then discusses how the limitations imposed by this poor metaphor (of utility as energy) brought a lot of difficulties to economists trying to introduce production into their economic models. Reading the book did make me understand better where some of the neoclassical economic tools come from and think about some of their limitations.

You can tell Mirowski intended to have this book as a grand contribution to the deconstruction of science and he includes some discussion on the evolution of science and Man's engagement with the world (the attempt to create metrics that allow the comparison of everything in a single measure). In this I feel the book is a little bit less convincing - Mirowski's view of metaphor in science seems a bit reductive as he continually seems to indicate that metaphor should only be used if you are willing to take it to the last consequences, if the two phenomena being compared are really pretty much the same.

I do not want to end the review with what I assume has been a common answer from economists to this book - that economics went its own way over the 20th century, and even if it started with a forced metaphor, it developed a life of its own - but the truth is that since this book was written much has changed in economics. While neoclassical economics is still reliant on utility theory which is what Mirowski sees as a travesty, its philosophy of science has changed significantly, with more and more work being computational and attempting to match data rather than develop theorems in the way that early micro theory did. I guess Mirowski addresses this in his other book Machine Dreams which I have not read.

Finally, let me say that if you're a bit interested in economics because after all it is a field of knowledge with much impact in our lives, but you have not really studied economics from any textbook in the past, this book is a bit too technical and in the weeds for you. Does not really read as an interesting book for the wider public (it even includes equations in the text...).

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this a lot (probably equally due to his prose as my lack of maths) but Mirowski is always very exciting. (Whether excitingness is the best virtue for an historian or social theorist, if it's at the expense of other virtues, is another question.)

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've ever read about what is wrong with contemporary economics as a field of study. I'm sure I would worship this book if I understood physics and calculus better.

[Matias Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly incisive. Projects the problems that confound the foundation of economics as alterations and isometries with physical sciences.

[Realconsumer · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is not at all clear to me, that a chair has a single number representing its market value.
Person A might trade 30 loafs of bread for it and person B would trade 5 loafs of bread for it.
Yet somehow neoclassical theories of values assigns both chairs and bread a concrete number, a market value.

This book gave a good insight on the ideology that drives neoclassical economics and how this theory rose historically. I can rest a little more assured knowing that the world will not suddenly collapse, but, as Mirowski points out, cybernetic thoughts are displacing neoclassical economics.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second Mirowski book I've read. This really encouraged me to read more of his work about the history of economics, science and social theory.

Mirowski's irony makes this more readable to me, but less readable to others.

[Chuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most insightful history of economics that I've ever read.