Machine Dreams Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science [Hardcover]

Machine Dreams recounts how the computer has transformed the content of American economics.Machine Dreams recounts the story of how the computer came to transform the very content of American economics, and how the mathematician John von Neumann inadvertently became the most important thinker for the economics profession in the 20th century. The narrative crosses the two genres of the history of economic thought and World War II, arguing that the Second World War and the Cold War were central to the postwar rise of the neoclassical orthodoxy in America. The treatment concludes with reflections on the ways in which the computer will further transform economics in the 21st century.Machine Dreams recounts the story of how the computer came to transform the very content of American economics, and how the mathematician John von Neumann inadvertently became the most important thinker for the economics profession in the 20th century. The narrative crosses the two genres of the history of economic thought and World War II, arguing that the Second World War and the Cold War were central to the postwar rise of the neoclassical orthodoxy in America. The treatment concludes with reflections on the ways in which the computer will further transform economics in the 21st century.This is the first cross-over book in the history of science written by an historian of economics, combining a number of disciplinary and stylistic orientations. In it Philip Mirowshki shows how what is conventionally thought to be history of technology can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. His analysis combines Cold War history with the history of the postwar economics profession in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with the content of such abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. He links the literature on cyborg science found in science studies to economics, an element missing in the literature to date. MilÍ