Speaking of misreadings, although I am a fan of Mirowski's work, Kevin Hoover, who is a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Methodology sent me a scathing review of Mirowski's main work, _More Heat than Light_. Hoover claims, with strong supporting evidence, that Phil put words into peoples' mouths and created some real straw men in his exposition. One such example is in regard to Irving Fisher's Ph.D thesis, a central key in his argument, where he puts words in the mouth of J. Willard Gibbs that weren't there. Mirowski is right, however, about economists' "physics envy," one of the better wisecracks I've ever encountered on the subject.
BTW, the outcome of the Santa Fe exchange was that in the long run the physicists won over the economists at SFI. One can see this by comparing the book I recommended yesterday out of SFI, edited by Arthur, Durlauf, and Lane, and the first volume with the same title published in 1988 and edited by Anderson, Arrow, and Pines. In that volume one can see the economists lining up and by and large throwing all kinds of orthodox general equilibrium garbage at the physicists who are clearly rather amused. This more recent volume shows the economists having adopted many of the techniques of the more recent physicists, and with little of the standard stuff, perhaps the latest verions of physics envy, :-). Barkley Rosser Barkley Rosser On Mon, 10 Aug 1998 18:38:06 -0700 (PDT) michael at ecst.csuchico.edu wrote:
> Phil Mirowski has shown that the founders of modern economics engaged in a
> willful misreading of physics when they appropriated physics' mathematics.
>
> I cannot imagine anybody not reading Althusser only because of his poor
> mathematical understanding of overdetermination.
>
> For a time, I worked as a translator in the Dutch Institute of Statistics
> even though my understanding of the language was poor. My
> misunderstandings were a constant source of inspiration to me --
> mistaken ideas can often be the source of great inspiration.
>
> Didn't people take LSD in the 60's to scramble their brains in search of
> inspiration?
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu