Philip Mirowski

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Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2012), 16; Keith Tribe, “Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930–1980,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 90; Sam Bowman, “Coming Out as Neoliberals,” Adam Smith Institute Blog, October 11, 2016, https://­w ww​.­adamsmith​.­org ​/ ­blog ​/­coming​-­out​-­a s​-­neo​l ib​ e​r als. 13. Lars Feld quoted in Bert Losse, “Economic Neoliberalism: Philosophy of Freedom,” Handelsblatt Global, June 10, 2017. NOTES TO PAGE 3 291 14. Philip Mirowski, “The Po­liti­cal Movement That Dared Not Speak Its Own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective ­u nder Erasure,” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper no. 23 (September 2014), 6. 15.

Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge In Society (1945),” in Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 86. 53. Ibid. 54. Paul Lewis and Peter Lewin, “­Orders, ­Orders, Everywhere . . . ​On Hayek’s The Market and Other O ­ rders,” Cosmos and Taxis 2 (2015): 15. 55. Philip Mirowski, “On the Origins (at Chicago) of Some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics,” in Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of Amer­i­ca’s Most Power­ful Economics Program, ed. Robert Van Horn, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas A. Stapleford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 262. 56. Lewis, “The Emergence of ‘Emergence,’ ” 120. 57. F. A. Hayek, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena (1964),” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, ed.

It may be more accurate to see Hayek as more a proponent of the idea of Homo regularis than of the idea of Homo economicus: The first commandment of ­humans is not to maximize profit but to react to stimuli according to rules in a way that ­will maximize the chance of survival. ­Humans, to Hayek, are “rules-­following animals.”75 Rules, like prices, are signals directing the individual, often at a “super-conscious” level. Hayek’s “neuro-­sensory conjecture” has been explored deeply by scholars both sympathetic to and critical of his thinking.76 What Philip Mirowski 232 GLOBALISTS calls Hayek’s “agnotology” is echoed in the presumption of “radical ignorance” of economic actors in the work of t­ hose who seek to explain why Hayek’s model is incompatible with the “rational search” implied in con­temporary forms of neoclassical economics.77 As the above meta­phors make clear, the idea of agency is diffuse in Hayek’s work.


Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Food sovereignty, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, labor-force participation, late capitalism, means of production, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, Philip Mirowski, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, shareholder value, sharing economy, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, young professional, zero-sum game

They are charted by a range of thinkers including Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy in The Crisis of Neoliberalism, Michael Hudson in Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents, Yves Smith in E-CONned: How Unrestrained Self-Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism, Matt Taibbi in Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, and Philip Mirowski in Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown.28 Intensified inequality, crass commodification and commerce, ever-growing corporate inf luence in government, economic havoc and instability — certainly all of these are consequences of neoliberal policy, and all are material for loathing or popular protest, as indeed, Occupy Wall Street, the Southern European protests against austerity policies, and, earlier, the “Antiglobalization” movement loathed and protested them.

University administrations use the language of best practices to implement reorganizations and cuts with enormous implications for student access, staff positions, and education itself, to discuss the policing of demonstrations, and to prepare “rollouts” of new information systems and/or benefits policies.43 Philip Mirowski describes a consulting service called Family/360 that, for a price, provides tailored best practices for parents to help them “create more positive family memories for [their] children.”44 Legislation introduced to prohibit the use of live animals (pigs and goats) in U.S. armed forces combat training was named the BEST Practices Act (the Battlefield Excellence through Superior Training Practices Act).45 An independent association of funeral homes runs a competition for best practices by funeral homes that awards the winner an iPad Air.46 While best practices are promiscuous across research protocols, service agencies, industries, investment strategies, policing, and more, equally striking is their traffic across these and thus their effect in reconfiguring policing, education, military, and social-service activity through a business model.

There is now a fine set of intellectual histories of neoliberalism, including Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World (New York: Verso, 2014); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (New York: Verso, 2013); and Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Each of these works contributes to an appreciation of neoliberalism as emerging from several streams of dissident thought in the postwar period, eventually taking shape as a governing rationality that drew on and diverged from these waters.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Sam Shead, “Google I/O: Google Research Becomes Google AI,” Forbes, May 9, 2018.   18.   Alain Supiot, The Spirit of Philadelphia: Social Justice vs. the Total Market (New York: Verso, 2012).   19.   Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 25.   20.   For an analysis of the interest of major platform companies (such as Facebook) in scientific research, see Philip Mirowski, “The Future(s) of Open Science,” Social Studies of Science 48, no. 2 (2018): 171–203.   21.   Kurt Wagner, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Philanthropy Organization Is Acquiring a Search and AI Startup Called Meta,” Recode, January 24, 2017.   22.   

Irani, 228.   39.   Vinyals et al., “Show and Tell.”   40.   Xiaoliang Ling et al., “Model Ensemble for Click Prediction in Bing Search Ads,” in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 2017, 689–98.   41.   Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011).   42.   Hayek writes, “A pre-formation of an order or pattern in a brain or mind is … an inferior method of securing an order.” Friedrich A.

That is, AI’s new progressive rebranding is not a real departure from the field’s imperial roots but rather an adaptation to changing political sensibilities. “AI” REAPPEARS, AN EXPERT INDUSTRY ASSEMBLES Usage of the term “AI” spiked around the mid-2010s in both global and U.S. media (see figure 2.1). While AI drew great media attention several decades earlier, in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, interest then dwindled. In 2002 historian Philip Mirowski wrote that “AI has apparently lost the knack of blinding people with science, at least for now.”1 It was only around 2013 that usage rose sharply again, and within a few years “AI” seemed to be everywhere. An expert industry quickly assembled around AI: universities launched centers and degree programs on AI and society, think tanks began writing AI policy papers, and the media started talking about AI nonstop.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Van Horn, Robert, and Matthias Klaes. “Chicago Neoliberalism Versus Cowles Planning: Perspectives on Patents and Public Goods,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 47 (2011): 302–21. Van Horn, Robert, and Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin. Van Horn, Robert, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas Stapleford, eds. Building Chicago Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Mentor, 1953). Vernon, Richard. “The Great Society and the Open Society: Liberalism in Hayek and Popper,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 9 (1976): 261–76.

(Frank) When Prophecy Fails (Festinger) Whinston, Michael, Microeconomic Theory, White, Lawrence White House White Mountains Wikipedia Will, George Williamson, Stephen Winners curse Winter, Sidney Wolf, Martin Wolin, Sheldon Woodford, Michael World Bank World of Natural Order World War II Wren-Lewis, Simon WTO (World Trade Organization) Y Yale University Z Zingales, Luigi Zoellick, Robert Zombie Economics (Quiggin) Zuccotti Park Zuidhof, Peter-Wim Copyright First published by Verso 2013 © Philip Mirowski 2013 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN: 978-1-781-68393-3 (e-book) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mirowski, Philip, 1951– Never let a serious crisis go to waste : how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown / Philip Mirowski. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown Philip Mirowski To neoliberals of all parties Contents List of Tables List of Figures 1. One More Red Nightmare The Crisis That Didn’t Change Much of Anything 2. Shock Block Doctrine Neoliberalism as Thought Collective and Political Program 3. Everyday Neoliberalism 4. Mumbo Jumble The Underwhelming Response of the Economics Profession to the Crisis 5. The Shock of the New Have Neoclassical Economists Learned Anything at all from the Crisis? 6. The Red Guide to the Neoliberal Playbook Notes Bibliography Index Copyright List of Tables 4.1 Average profit per employee, United States 5.1 Economist salary differentials, by academic sector List of Figures 1.1 Hilarity at the Federal Reserve 2.1 Growth of MPS-affiliated think tanks 2.2 MPS founding meeting, national representation 2.3 MPS 1991 membership, national representation 2.4 Mentions of Friedrich Hayek in various English-language sources 4.1 Corporate profits/U.S.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

THE MAKING OF NEOLIBERAL HEGEMONY 1.Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 40. 2.This standard history is now in the process of being rewritten, and this chapter relies heavily on the pioneers of this research, including the unpublished work of Alex Andrews. See, for example, Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason; Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931–1983 (London: Fontana, 1995); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 3.Witness, for instance, the unlikely but immensely productive alliance in the United States between economic neoliberals and radical social conservatives.

Secondly, they sought to build a counter-hegemonic project that would overturn the consensus around social democracy and Keynesian policies. They took a full-spectrum approach to changing hegemonic conditions and built up an entire ideological infrastructure that was capable of insinuating itself into every political issue and every fibre of political common sense. It overthrew the hegemonic ideas of its time. As Philip Mirowski writes, their strategic genius was to appreciate that it is not enough to dangle a utopian vision just beyond reach as eventual motivation for political action; the cadre that triumphs is the side that can simultaneously mount a full set of seemingly unrelated political proposals that deal with the short-, medium-, and long-term horizons of action, combining regimes of knowledge and interim outcomes, so that the end result is the inexorable movement of the polis ever closer to the eventual goal.

., pp. 8–9. 88.Giles Tremlett, ‘Spain’s Savings Banks’ Culture of Greed, Cronyism, and Political Meddling’, Guardian, 8 June 2012. 89.Boyle, Local Banking System, p. 10. 90.Andrew Bibby, ‘Co-op Bank Crisis: What Next for the Co-operative Sector?’, Guardian, 21 January 2014. 91.Greg Sharzer, No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), p. 3. 92.Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), p. 326. 93.Zibechi, ‘Latin America Today’. 94.Christian Marazzi, ‘Exodus Without Promised Land’, in Campagna and Campiglio, eds, What We Are Fighting For, p. viii. 95.Such an approach has also been labelled ‘alternativism’ by communisation theorists.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

It is telling that, in a 2010 survey, a large majority of academic economists believed that low rates caused, or at least greatly contributed to, the housing bubble, but most economists specializing in monetary policy continued to side with the Fed’s view.38 If Bernanke, as head of the Federal Reserve, held that the crisis wasn’t a failure of ‘economic science’ but one of economic management (regulation), it was only to be expected that the Fed’s own research team should follow their chief’s lead.39 They occupied an echo chamber in which existing beliefs were reinforced and uncomfortable questions ignored. ‘Bernanke’s Fed,’ concludes historian Philip Mirowski, ‘has evaded suffering any consequences for its intellectual incompetence’ in the lead up to the crisis. Instead of being hounded from office, Bernanke was credited with saving the world from another Great Depression and anointed Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ in 2009. His exercise in denial meant that the Fed learned little from the crisis.

Monetary policy errors show up only as disturbances to the price level, ‘without any further consequence’, as Hume put it. The inadequacy of their models meant that nearly every central banker was caught off guard by the subprime crisis. ‘Most economists did not understand the economy’s peculiar path prior to the crisis, and persisted in befuddlement in the aftermath,’ writes Philip Mirowski.4 After the crisis, no intellectual paradigm shift took place. A fixed belief in the veil of money remained firmly in place, a blindfold that obscured the true operations of the economy from those who wore it. This belief explains why central bankers denied responsibility for the collapse in long-term rates after 2008, even as they pushed short-term rates to zero or below and attempted in various ways to manipulate bond yields.fn1 Nor could they admit that their actions might have any lasting impact on the economy’s growth rate: ‘It’s important to recognize … that what monetary policy affects is not the potential rate of growth, long-run rate of growth, but rather the cyclical part,’ said Fed Chairman Bernanke in 2013.5 The lowest interest rates in history and lacklustre economic growth were routinely ascribed by central bankers to secular stagnation.

Unconventional monetary policies arrested Wall Street’s collapse. Bondholders were bailed out. Financial insiders with access to the Fed’s emergency lending facilities got to buy up distressed securities at bargain prices with subsidized loans. Despite record losses on Wall Street, billions of dollars in bonuses were distributed. The Fed, writes Philip Mirowski, ‘bestowed upon the banks seemingly permanent options to reward executives and shareholders by capping the downside while permitting an unlimited upside’.fn3 After 2008, another great wealth bubble inflated, larger than either of its recent predecessors. Since the rich owned proportionately more financial assets, they enjoyed most of the spoils as the markets recovered.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

In a survey of 1,500 scientists . . . Monya Baker, ‘1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility’, Nature, 25 May 2016. On the replication crisis, see Nature’s special online report, ‘Challenges in irreproducible research’, Nature, 18 October 2018. 51. According to the historian of ideas Philip Mirowski . . . Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2011. 52. Among the worst examples of this degradation . . . C. G. Begley and L. M. Ellis, ‘Raise standards for preclinical cancer research’, Nature, 483, 2012, pp. 531–3; C. G. Begley, ‘Reproducibility: Six red flags for suspect work’, Nature, 497, 2013, pp. 433–4. 53.

The crisis consists of the fact that the results of many scientific studies are impossible to replicate in subsequent tests. In a survey of 1,500 scientists in the journal Nature, 70 per cent of the respondents failed to replicate the findings of another scientist’s experiment.50 Half of them couldn’t even replicate their own findings. According to the historian of ideas Philip Mirowski, one of the main causes of the problem is that science is becoming commodified.51 As it becomes an outsourced research engine for corporations, quality control collapses. A ‘parallel universe of think tanks and shadowy “experts”’ emerges outside of academia, while inside, the state demands policy-oriented research but is increasingly indifferent to quality controls.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

DeMartino, The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011); Charles Ferguson, “Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics,” The Chronicle Review, October 3, 2010; Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent, eds., Science Bought and Sold: Essays in the Economics of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 42. See Frederic Filloux, “Google News: The Secret Sauce,” The Guardian, February 25, 2013. 43. Neoliberalism is a complex set of ideas, perhaps best summarized in Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013), 53– 67. For our purposes, the critical tenet of the neoliberal “thought collective” is that “the market (suitably reengineered and promoted) can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the fi rst place.”

Bhidé, A Call for Judgment. 94. MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked; Anupam Chander, “Facebookistan,” North Carolina Law Review 90 (2012): 1807–1844. 304 NOTES TO PAGES 214–218 95. For the strange career of neoliberal approaches to antitrust law, see Robert Van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “Reinventing Monopoly,” in The Road from Mount Pèlerin, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 219 ff. 96. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). First published 1956. 97. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 574. 98.


pages: 256 words: 60,620

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

Paul Cootner, an economist at MIT and the editor of the volume, was unconvinced of Mandelbrot’s case. “If [Mandelbrot] is right,” he wrote, “almost all of our statistical tools are obsolete. Almost without exception, past econometric work is meaningless.”17 But Cootner could rest easy, because Mandelbrot’s ideas never penetrated mainstream economics. Philip Mirowski, a historian and philosopher of economic thought at Notre Dame, notes, “The simple historical fact is that [Mandelbrot’s economic ideas] have been by and large ignored, with some few exceptions… which seem to have been subsequently abandoned by their authors.”18 A few years ago, I went to a dinner in New York City that included Mandelbrot.

This is also a core theme of Taleb, The Black Swan. See also Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 17. Paul H. Cootner, “Comments on The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices,” in Cootner, The Random Character of Stock Market Prices, 413–418. 18. Philip Mirowski, The Effortless Economy of Science? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 232. 19. Felix Salmon, “Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street,” Wired Magazine, March 2009, 74–79, 112.; and MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 223 and 233. 20. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W.W.


Corbyn by Richard Seymour

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, collective bargaining, credit crunch, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fake news, first-past-the-post, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, land value tax, liberal world order, mass immigration, means of production, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, precariat, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, Snapchat, stakhanovite, systematic bias, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, working-age population, éminence grise

On the role of neoliberals in the Pinochet dictatorship, see David Harvey, Neoliberalism: A Short History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 7–9; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007, pp. 77–87; Greg Grandin, ‘The Road from Serfdom: Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire’, Counterpunch, 17 November 2006. And on the underlying assumptions of neoliberal thought with regard to state and economy, see: Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso, 2013; Philip Mirowski, ‘On the Origins (at Chicago) of some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics’, in Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski and Thomas A Stapleford, eds., Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 26James M.


pages: 87 words: 25,823

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Both of these doctrines or dogmas stem from the writings of core right-wing thinkers such as Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Rothbard, and others, as well as their more recent followers. The most trenchant critic of this work, on whose research my analysis relies in particular, is the economic historian and theorist Philip Mirowski, whose Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2014) remains the single most comprehensive account of what he calls the Neoliberal Thought Collective and the nearly identical Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), of which Hayek was the founding president. Mirowski, along with some of his colleagues, has explained with particular cogency how Hayek and others disseminated neoliberal doctrine.


pages: 317 words: 87,566

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business logic, corporate governance, data science, dematerialisation, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gini coefficient, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Leo Hollis, lifelogging, market bubble, mental accounting, military-industrial complex, nudge unit, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Philip Mirowski, power law, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social contagion, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, you are the product

., 11–12. 16Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 17Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 101. 18Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 53. 19Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 83. 20Quoted in Philip Mirowski, More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 219. 21See Philip Mirowski, Edgeworth on Chance, Economic Hazard, and Statistics, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994. 22David Colander, ‘Retrospectives: Edgeworth’s Hedonimeter and the Quest to Measure Utility’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 21: 2, 2007. 23D.


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The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Tom Bottomore, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 [1910]. 13 Blakeley, Stolen, ‘Chapter Two: Vulture Capitalism: The Financialisation of the Corporation’. 14 Thomas Philippon, ‘The Economics and Politics of Market Concentration’, NBER Reporter, no. 4, December 2019. 15 Karsten Kohler, Alexander Guschanski and Engelbert Stockhammer, ‘The Impact of Financialisation on the Wage Share: A Theoretical Clarification And Empirical Test’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 43, no. 4 (July 2019). 16 Mimoza Shabani, Judith Tyson, Jan Toporowski and Terry McKinley, ‘The Financial System in the UK’, FESSUD Studies in Financial Systems, no. 14, February 2015. 17 Josh Ryan Collins, Laurie Macfarlane and Toby Lloyd, Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing, London: Zed Books, 2017. 18 Blakeley, Stolen, ‘Chapter Three: Let Them Eat Houses: The Financialisation of the Household’. 19 Colin Crouch, ‘Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 11, no. 3 (August 2009). 20 Adam Tooze, ‘Notes on the Global Condition: Of Bond Vigilantes, Central Bankers and the Crisis, 2008–2017’, 2017, adamtooze.com. 21 Zak Cope, The Wealth of (Some) Nations: Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer, London: Pluto, 2019. 22 Grace Blakeley, ‘On Borrowed Time: Finance and the UK Current Account Deficit’, Institute for Public Policy Research, Commission on Economic Justice, 2018. 23 Blakeley, Stolen, ‘Chapter One: The Golden Age of Capitalism’. 24 Jeremy Green, ‘Anglo-American Development, the Euromarkets, and the Deeper Origins of Neoliberal Deregulation’, Review of International Studies 42, no. 3 (July 2016): 425–49. 25 Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 26 Grace Blakeley, ‘On Borrowed Time’; Bank of England, ‘North Sea Oil and Gas: Costs and Benefits’, Bank of England Quarterly Statistical Bulletin, March 1982. 27 Office for National Statistics, ‘Changes in the Economy Since the 1970s’, 2019, ons.gov.uk. 28 Cope,The Wealth of (some) Nations. 29 ‘Five facts about the UK service sector’, Office for National Statistics, 29 September 2016. 30 Crouch, ‘Privatised Keynesianism’. 31 ONS, ‘Employees in the UK by Industry: 2018’, Office for National Statistics, 26 September 2019, ons.gov.uk. 32 Blakeley, Stolen. 33 Richard Disney and Guannan Luo, ‘The Right to Buy Public Housing in Britain: A Welfare Analysis’, Journal of Housing Economics 35 (March 2017): 51–68. 34 Collins et al., Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing. 35 Shabani et al., ‘The Financial System in the UK’. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Thomas Hale, ‘The Bank of England Has a Strange Idea of What QE Achieved’, Financial Times Alphaville, 3 August 2018, ftalphaville.ft.com. 39 Jannes van Loon and Manuel B.


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Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In this way, governments can avoid blame if things don’t work out at the same time as they not only avoid challenging big business but deliver new customers to them through privatisation. Focusing purely on individual consumers depoliticises things. Although many neoliberal politicians dismiss global warming as fiction, it’s hard to believe that they really believe the vast weight of scientific research is mistaken. Philip Mirowski has researched neoliberal think-tanks and argues that – contrary to appearances, particularly their tendency to deny climate change – neoliberals actually have a strategy for dealing with it. This strategy has three parts: 1. deny climate change;61 2. advocate carbon markets, in which permissions to emit CO2 can be traded; 3. invest in ‘geoengineering’ to weaken and reverse global warming and its effects.

Sometimes the term is just used to cover ‘everything that’s been happening recently’, but this misses its specificity and the counter-currents. For those wanting to read more on it, I recommend David Harvey’s (2007) A brief history of neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Best of all, especially in relation to the crisis, is Philip Mirowski’s (2013) Never let a serious crisis go to waste, London: Verso. 27 Sayer, A. (2007) ‘Moral economy as critique’, New Political Economy, 12(2), pp 261–70. Many associate the term ‘moral economy’ with Edward Thompson’s research on regulated markets: (1971) ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, 50, pp 76–136.

Also, most such workers are women, and gender discrimination depresses pay too. 40 Hayek, F.A. (1976) ‘“Social” or distributive justice’, in his Law, legislation and liberty, vol 2, p 74. Similarly: ‘the value which a person’s capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything we call moral merit or deserts’: Hayek, F.A. (1960) The constitution of liberty, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, p 94. 41 Philip Mirowski calls this division between what neoliberals say in private and what they say in public neoliberalism’s ‘double-truth’. Mirowski, P. (2013) Never let a serious crisis go to waste, London: Verso. The quotation from Hayek encapsulates it. 42 Some enlightened employers may try not to favour applicants according to their accent and demeanour and social background, but the applicants have already been made unequal by being brought up in a society of wide economic and social inequalities, so they are usually competing unequally for unequal positions. 43 Wright (2000).


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The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas by Janek Wasserman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, New Journalism, New Urbanism, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game, éminence grise

“Gerschenkron’s Secret: A Research Note.” Critique 40, no. 4 (2012): 553–62. Van Horn, Robert. “Jacob Viner’s Critique of Chicago Neoliberalism.” In Van Horn, Mirowski, and Stapleford, Building Chicago Economics, 279–300. Van Horn, Robert, and Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” In Mirowski and Plehwe, Road from Mont Pèlerin, 139–79. Van Horn, Robert, Philip Mirowski, and Thomas Stapleford, eds. Building Chicago Economics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Van Sickle, John. Review of Die Gemeinwirtschaft by Ludwig von Mises. AER 13, no. 3 (1923): 533–36. Vaughn, Karen.


pages: 429 words: 114,726

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

And although the programmer being referred to here was obviously a logistical or mathematical planner rather than a computer programmer, it was also clear that this new elite would be intimately familiar with computer technology and software design.68 Although “Management in the 1980s” is most generally cited for its role in introducing the term information technology, it is best understood in the context of a more general shift in management practices in the decades after the Second World War. The war had produced a series of “managerial sciences”—including operations research, game theory, and systems analysis—all of which promised a more mathematical and technologically oriented approach to business management. As Philip Mirowski and others have suggested, these nascent “cyborg” sciences were deeply connected to the emerging technology of electronic computing.69 Not only did many of these new techniques require a significant amount of computing power in and of themselves but they relied on the electronic computer as a central metaphor for understanding the nature of the modern bureaucratic organization.70 Many of the most visionary proposals for the use of the electronic computer in management frequently rode into the corporation on the back of this new breed of expert consultants.

Watts, Business Experience with Electronic Computers: A Synthesis of What Has Been Learned from Electronic Data Processing Installations (New York: Price Waterhouse, 1959), 81–83. 66. Felix Kaufman, “EDP and the Disenchanted,” California Management Review 1, no. 4 (1959): 67. 67. Harold Leavitt and Thomas Whisler, “Management in the 1980s,” Harvard Management Review 36, no. 6 (1958): 41–48. 68. Ibid., 44. 69. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 70. Herbert Alexander Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization (New York: Macmillan, 1947). 71. Herbert Alexander Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (New York: Harper, 1960), 22. 72.


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New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Will Davies, “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism,” Theory, Culture and Society 34, nos. 5–6 (2017): 233 (italics in original). 71. I believe this integration of democratic and expertocratic values may be the key to resolving the divide between “diggers” and “levelers” in Science and Technology Studies, trenchantly developed by Philip Mirowski in a recent draft. Philip Mirowski, “Democracy, Expertise and the Post-truth Era: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Politics of STS,” (working paper, version 1.1, April 2020), https://www.academia.edu/42682483/Democracy_Expertise_and_the_Post-Truth_Era_An_Inquiry_into_the_Contemporary_Politics_of_STS. 72. Hubert L.


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Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). For a much more intricate and specific (but still narrative) study of the ambitions that seemed to be enabled by economics’ encounter with information technology in the post-war twentieth century, see Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). 6 Value shone in material things once labour had made them useful: the ‘labour theory of value’, as originated by Adam Smith and passed via David Ricardo to Marx. Soviet economists tended to be aware of pre-Marxian classical economics, at least in the form of citations and summaries, but not the post-Marxian development of it.

Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th edn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). For a much more intricate and specific (but still narrative) study of the ambitions that seemed to be enabled by economics’ encounter with information technology in the post-war twentieth century, see Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002). 6 Value shone in material things once labour had made them useful: the ‘labour theory of value’, as originated by Adam Smith and passed via David Ricardo to Marx. Soviet economists tended to be aware of pre-Marxian classical economics, at least in the form of citations and summaries, but not the post-Marxian development of it.

Available at www.sovietcomputing.com Terry Dean Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudo-folklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk: M.E.Sharpe, Inc., 1990) Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: CUP, 2002) Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922; trans. from the German by J. Kahane (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981) Nikolai Nekrasov (‘Nicholas Nekrassov’), Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?, trans. Juliet M Soskice (London, 1917) V.


pages: 341 words: 98,954

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

A good article on the ideology’s enduring impact on access to medicines is Amy Kapczynski, “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism” (2019). The legacy of the Chicago School’s focus on patents and antirust revisionism is assessed in two volumes of essays: Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism (2020), and Robert Pitofsky, How the Chicago School Overshot the Mark: The Effect of Conservative Economic Analysis on U.S. Antitrust (2008). THE MAKING OF A MONSTER The prescription drug boom of the 1950s in many ways created the drug industry we know today—its marketing techniques, its symbiotic financial relationship with physicians and medical journals, its reactionary alliance with organized medicine.

For critical perspectives on Bayh-Dole’s impact on the culture of academic research, see Rebecca Eisenberg, “Universities: The Fallen Angels of Bayh-Dole?” (2018); David Dickson, The New Politics of Science (1988); Daniel S. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (2001); and Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011). Clifford M. Gross and Joseph P. Allen’s Technology Transfer for Entrepreneurs: A Guide to Commercializing Federal Laboratory Innovations (2003) provides a more honest picture of Bayh-Dole than any academic work ever could. THE G77, THE WHO, AND THE WTO For good general overviews of the UN’s founding and early years, and the sharpening of a north-south divide, see Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (2006); and Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012).


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Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Talese, 2009). 4 “MONEY WAS ALWAYS A CONCERN”: Friedman gives an account in the book he co-authored with his wife, Rose, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 20–32. 5 YET THE FAMILY WAS ABLE TO BUY: Author interview with Milton Friedman, November 2003. 6 “FANATICALLY RELIGIOUS”: Ibid. 7 IF HIS FATHER HAD ANY POLITICAL INFLUENCE: Ibid. 8 “SAVE FOR MY PARENTS”: Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 30 9 FRIEDMAN THOUGHT MARSHALL’S MODEL: Friedman’s early devotion to Marshall is evident in an essay, “Marshall’s Demand Curve,” in his book Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). 10 “LIKE HIS MENTOR”: Friedman and Friedman, Two Lucky People, p. 32. 11 JONES WAS THE REASON: Ibid., p. 33. 12 IT EMPHASIZED, AS SIMONS PUT IT: Henry Simons private papers, cited by Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 145. 13 THIS APPROACH IN A TIME: H. L. Miller, “On the Chicago School of Economics,” Journal of Political Economy 70 (February 1962): 64–69. 14 “MY TEACHERS REGARDED THE DEPRESSION”: Milton Friedman, “Comments on the Critics,” Journal of Political Economy (September-October 1972): 906–50. 15 “SIMONS FOR EXAMPLE DID NOT EQUATE”: Miller “On the Chicago School of Economics,” p. 70. 16 “ONCE A DEFLATION HAS GOTTEN UNDER WAY”: Henry Simons, Personal Income and Taxation: The Definition of Income as a Problem of Fiscal Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. 222, cited by Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo, “Fiscal Policy for the Global Economic Crisis,” Challenge, May-June 2001. 17 HE WAS, IN FACT, A MILD PROPONENT: Author interview with Milton Friedman, November 2003; Lanny Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (London: Macmillan Palgrave, 2007). 18 FEW INVITATIONS CAME HIS WAY: Friedman did get an offer from the University of Wisconsin, but became embroiled in what he said was an anti-Semitic battle between the economics department and the business school, and he had to leave.

Knight was also more sympathetic to the progressive writings of John Kenneth Galbraith than his younger associates. “Colleagues spoof at [Galbraith], but I find some truth in what he says, perhaps as much as in their position,” he wrote to the British economist Lionel Robbins, referring in particular to Friedman. As economic historians Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski make clear, claims that the “neo-liberalism” of Friedman was a pure outgrowth of the highly respected Chicago pioneers like Knight and Simons were misleading. Once securely at the University of Chicago, Friedman became a prolific researcher and writer, much of his work based on a Marshallian framework.


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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-Liberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108, no. 1 (2012): 44–65, https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513611421481; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013); António Ferreira, “The Politics of Austerity as Politics of Law,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 6, no. 3 (2016): 496–519; David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015); David Jacobs and Lindsey Myers, “Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of US Income Differences Since 1950,” American Sociological Review 79 (2014): 752–74; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Greta R.

For a wonderful collection of essays on this subject, see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 38. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 39. Short, “The Paranoid Style,” 44–46. 40. Short, 52–53. Economic historian Philip Mirowski summarizes the “metatheses” that since the 1980s helped to constitute neoliberalism as a loose “paradigm,” despite its amorphous, multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory theories and practices. Among these, several became essential shelter for the surveillance capitalists’ bold actions, secret operations, and rhetorical misdirection: (1) democracy was to be constrained in favor of actively reconstructing the state as the agent of a stable market society; (2) the entrepreneur and the corporation were conflated, enshrining “corporate personhood,” rather than the rights of citizens, as the focus of legal protections; (3) freedom was defined negatively, as “freedom from” interference in the natural laws of competition, and all control was understood as coercive, except for market control; and (4) inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and a force for progress.

Among these, several became essential shelter for the surveillance capitalists’ bold actions, secret operations, and rhetorical misdirection: (1) democracy was to be constrained in favor of actively reconstructing the state as the agent of a stable market society; (2) the entrepreneur and the corporation were conflated, enshrining “corporate personhood,” rather than the rights of citizens, as the focus of legal protections; (3) freedom was defined negatively, as “freedom from” interference in the natural laws of competition, and all control was understood as coercive, except for market control; and (4) inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and a force for progress. Later, surveillance capitalism’s success, its aggressive rhetoric, and its leaders’ willingness to fight every challenge, both in the courts and in the court of public opinion, further cemented these guiding principles in US politics, economic policies, and regulatory approaches. See Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013). See also Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 166–75. 41.


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Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It is hard to overstate the importance of RAND, especially during its early years, in transforming established patterns of thought not only in the military sphere but throughout the social sciences. The resources and tools it had available, including the most advanced computers of the day, provided it with a capacity to innovate, which it did with a remarkable sense of mission and confidence. The new universe that was explored at RAND was simulated as much as observed. Philip Mirowski describes what he calls the “Cyborg sciences.” These reflected the new interactions between men and machines. They broke down the distinctions between nature and society, as models of one began to resemble the other, and between “reality” and simulacra. The Monte Carlo simulations adopted for dealing with uncertainty in data during the Manhattan Project, for example, opened up a range of possible experiments to explore the logic of complex systems, discerning ways through uncertainty and forms of order in chaos.11 RAND analysts saw these new methods as supplanting rather than supplementing traditional patterns of thought.

This effort gained credibility because of the very special issues posed by nuclear weapons. The effort transformed thinking about not only strategy but also economics because it demonstrated the possibilities opened up by powerful computing capabilities for modeling all forms of human activity. Philip Mirowski has written of the “Cyborg sciences,” which developed along with computing, reflecting novel interactions between men and machines. They broke down the distinctions between nature and society, as models of one began to resemble the other, and between “reality” and simulacra. The Monte Carlo simulations adopted during the wartime atomic bomb project for dealing with uncertainty in data, for example, opened up a range of possible experiments to explore the logic of complex systems, discerning ways through uncertainty and forms of order in chaos.1 RAND analysts saw them as supplanting rather than supplementing traditional patterns of thought.

Paul Kennedy, Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (London: Allen Lane, 2013). 10. Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, “Simulating the Unthinkable: Gaming Future War in the 1950s and 1960s,” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 2 (April 2000): 169, 170. 11. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12–17. 12. Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), 48. 13. Hedley Bull, “Strategic Studies and Its Critics,” World Politics 20, no. 4 (July 1968): 593–605. 14.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Post-modernist literary criticism ‘deconstructs’ the ‘text’ by shifting attention from the truth of what is being asserted to the means by which people are persuaded of its truth. From this perspective, economic modelling is a persuasive undertaking: it does not aim to discover truth, it tries to persuade people of the truth of its own ‘text’. All reality is ‘socially constructed’. Philip Mirowski carries the argument further by saying that natural sciences, too, are built on persuasive utterance. There is a fundamental gap between our thought and reality which can only be bridged by metaphor, simile, analogy. Logical proofs are part of the persuasive machinery.22 There are three valuable implications of this approach.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Graham Burchell (2004; New York: Picador, 2008); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015); Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone Books, 2017); Monica Prasad, The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Monica Prasad, Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018); Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Loïc Wacquant: Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism; Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On NeoLiberal Society, trans.

Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Perry Anderson, “Two Revolutions,” New Left Review 61 (January–February 2010), https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii61/articles/perry-anderson-two-revolutions, accessed July 10, 2021. 47.On the idea of free enterprise and its place in American political and popular thought, see Lawrence Glickman, Free Enterprise: An American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). Chapter 3 1.The phrase “thought collective” to describe the aspirations of the Mont Pelerin Society appears in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). On the origins of the term itself, see Ludwick Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, eds., trans.


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Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

This `can get' [the winnings he can expect] is, of course, presumed to be a minimum; he may get more if others make mistakes (behave irrationall y)."19 This stipulation has posed a major problem for critics, including distinguished behavioral psychologists like Daniel Ellsberg and Richard Thaler, whom we will meet later. In a highly critical paper published in 1991, the historian Philip Mirowski asserted, "All is not well in the House of Game Theory-in every dreamhouse a heartache-and signs of pathology can no longer be ignored."20 He cites criticisms by Nobel Prize winners Henry Simon, Kenneth Arrow, and Paul Samuelson. He claims that game theory would never have amounted to anything had von Neumann not sold it to the military; he even goes so far as to speculate, "Some laid the blame for the escalation of nuclear weaponry directly at the door of game theory."21 Indeed, Mirowski claims that Morgenstern was a "godsend" to von Neumann because he proposed economists as an audience for game theory when no one else was interested.


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The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

See Robert Van Horn, “The Coming of Age of a Reformer Skeptic (1914– 1924),” History of Political Economy 42, no. 4 (2010): 601–30. 35. Director was not the first economist on the Chicago law school faculty. He took the place of Henry Simons, who played a formative role in the careers of Director, Friedman, and Stigler. See Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 155. 36. Edmund W. Kitch, “The Fire of Truth: A Remembrance of Law and Economics at Chicago, 1932–1970,” Journal of Law and Economics 26, no. 1. Coase’s comments are particularly interesting because his 1961 paper on transaction costs is often identified as the beginning of “law and economics” analysis.


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Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The election of Barack Obama in 2008, with plans to rescue the financial system and provide social health insurance, was the catalyst for fearsome mobilization of economic and intellectual muscle, fueled by libertarian ideology. Whether Mises won or lost the “socialist calculation debate” is not really the point. What was more important was that, in emphasizing the problem of rapid calculation, he set the terms on which the debate took place. In doing so, as the historian of economics Philip Mirowski has shown, he established the template for how mainstream economics would develop over the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the United States.12 Following Mises’ critique of Neurath, economists increasingly came to view their subject matter in terms of information and to understand markets as information processors.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: The Origins of Cognitive Science, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009); John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Orit Halpern, “Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Archives, Interfaces, and Networks in Cybernetics,” Configurations 13 (2007): 283–319; Stuart Umpleby, “A History of the Cybernetics Movement in the United States,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 91 (2005): 54–66; Bernard Geoghegan, “The Historiographic Conceptualization of Information: A Critical Survey,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30 (2008): 66–81.For more on cybernetics in the Soviet Union, see Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); David Holloway, “Innovation in Science: The Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” Science Studies 4 (1974): 299–337; and David Mindell, Jerome Segal, and Slava Gerovitch, “From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union,” in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Klein (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992), p. 191. 11 Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron (1905–83), French sociologist and social scientist, and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre. 12 Michael Polanyi, born Polányi Mihály (1891–1976), Hungarian-born English economist, chemist, and philosopher of science who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to avoid Jewish persecution. 13 Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966), the German economist whose ideas about the need to temper the depredations of the free market with “economic humanism” led to him help establish the highly successful postwar German social-market economy that underpinned the “German miracle.” 14 Now the Hôtel Mirador. 15 Albert Hunold (1899–1981). 16 Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 15. 17 George H. Nash (1945– ), American historian, authority on Herbert Hoover, and author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (Basic Books, New York, 1976). 18 Nash, Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, p. 26. 19 George Joseph Stigler (1911–91) who, after researching for the Manhattan Project, became a leading member of the University of Chicago School of Economics and protégé of Frank Knight, who won a Nobel Prize for economics in 1982. 20 John Jewkes (1902–88), professor of economic organization at Merton College, Oxford. 21 Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–94), former Marxist Viennese-born British scientific philosopher and advocate of the hypercritical liberal democratic tradition that forms the “open society.” 22 Dame (Cicely) Veronica “C.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, Macmillan 1888, Ch. 4 ‘Higgling’: see WN I.v.4; for Edgeworth’s overall critique of Walras, see his ‘Review of Léon Walras, Éléments d’économie politique pure’, Nature, 40.1036, September 1925 Transformation of political economy into economics: although Alfred Marshall is often credited with the shift in name, it is worth noting that he and Mary Paley Marshall had already scouted the change eleven years earlier, in their book The Economics of Industry of 1879 Effect of mathematical and physical models on economics: see Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light, Cambridge University Press 1989 Politics as epiphenomenon: the exact relations between politics and economics in Marx’s thought remain a matter of scholarly debate. In the words of Ralph Miliband, ‘Marx and Engels explicitly rejected any rigid and mechanistic notion of “determination”… But one must not protest too much.


The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain by Brett Christophers

Alan Greenspan, book value, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Corn Laws, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, estate planning, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, ghettoisation, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, late capitalism, market clearing, Martin Wolf, New Journalism, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Right to Buy, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, wealth creators

And one such criterion, maybe even the most important one, concerns the availability of information. One of Margaret Thatcher’s great inspirations for her privatization agenda was, of course, the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. For Hayek, market-based allocation was infinitely superior to state-based allocation because the market was, in Philip Mirowski’s words, ‘an information processor more powerful than any human brain’.2 But clearly a market cannot effectively process relevant information about the commodities circulating in that market if such information is not visible. For markets to be efficient, they must be information-rich – information must be freely available to all market participants.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

“Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan,” Avalon Project—Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/reagan1.asp. 14. A. Winston, “Where the GOP’s Tax Extremism Comes From,” [online] 2017, accessed Oct. 18, 2019, https://medium.com/@AndrewWinston/where-the-gops-tax-extremism-comes-from-90eb10e38b1c. 15. “Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report” (2019), https://news.gallup.com/reports/199961/7.aspx. 16. Philip Mirowski and Deiter Piehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 17. Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, “The Koch Network and Republican Party Extremism,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 3 (2016): 681–699. 18.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

An accomplished dentist is one who identifies the source of the patient’s problem – ‘What is going on here?’ – and draws effectively on old and new techniques from that store of knowledge to relieve that problem. A great contributor to dentistry, like Brånemark, develops a new technique of wide practical application. Economics demands data The American historian of economic thought Philip Mirowski popularised the term ‘physics envy’ to describe the longing of many economists to emulate Max Planck rather than Keynes’ dentist. And while Keynes’ description of Planck’s deductive reasoning is accurate, the knowledge of the solar system which lies behind NASA’s success originates not in axiomatic reasoning but in the careful and extensive observation of the planets undertaken in the sixteenth century by the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe.


pages: 668 words: 159,523

Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug by Augustine Sedgewick

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Day of the Dead, European colonialism, export processing zone, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Honoré de Balzac, imperial preference, Joan Didion, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Philip Mirowski, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, scientific management, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, vertical integration, wage slave, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Kemmerer Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 10. See Drake, Money Doctor. 11. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 102–5. 12. See, for example, Drake, Money Doctor. 13. For example, Douglas Vickers, Economics and Ethics: An Introduction to Theory, Institutions, and Policy (Westport, CT: Prager, 1997), 5–8. 14. Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193–275. 15. Roger E. Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. 16.


pages: 410 words: 106,931

Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, power law, precariat, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, technological solutionism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A handy digest of bien pensant thinking about globalization is Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York, 1999). For a counter-critique, see Edward Luttwak’s Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (New York, 1998). Two revealing genealogies of neo-liberalism are Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA, 2012), and Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA, 2009). On the loss of political spaces, see Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (New York, 1996). On Arendt’s notion of the common present and negative solidarity, see her essay on Karl Jaspers in Men in Dark Times (New York, 1970).


pages: 576 words: 105,655

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth

"there is no alternative" (TINA), accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, deindustrialization, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Irish property bubble, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, short selling, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Graber, “Constitutionalizing the Economy,” 45. 16. Berghahn and Young, “Reflections,” passim. 17. Ralf Ptak, “Neoliberalism in Germany: Revisiting the Ordoliberal Foundations of the Social Market Economy” in The Road From Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 102. 18. Gerber, “Constitutionalizing the Economy,” 48–49. 19. If you detect echoes of the Eurozone debacle here, you should. 20. Crudely, supply creates its own demand. 21. Carl J. Freidrich, “The Political Thought of Neo-Liberalism” American Political Science Review 49, 2 (1955): 511.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

., Duren, Riley and MacMartin, Douglas G. (2014) ‘Field Experiments on Solar Geoengineering: Report of a Workshop Exploring a Representative Research Portfolio’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 372 doi: 10.1098/rsta.2014.0175 Keith, David W. and MacMartin, Douglas G. (2015) ‘A Temporary, Moderate and Responsive Scenario for Solar Geoengineering’ Nature Climate Change doi: 10.1038/nclimate2493 Khan, Ehsan et al. (2001) Response Options to Limit Rapid or Severe Climate Change: Assessment of Research Needs US Department of Energy King, Paul – see May, James Kingsland, Sharon E. (1994) ‘Economics and Evolution: Alfred James Lotka and the Economy of Nature’ in Natural Images in Economic Thought: ‘Markets Read in Tooth and Claw’ ed Philip Mirowski, Cambridge University Press Kingsland, Sharon E. (1995) Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology Chicago University Press Kintisch, Eli (2010) Hack the Planet John Wiley and sons Klein, Naomi (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate Simon & Schuster (2014) Kravitz, Ben et al. (2013) ‘Climate Model Response from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP)’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres doi: 10.1002/jgrd.50646 Kravitz, Ben et al. (2014) ‘A Multi-Model Assessment of Regional Climate Disparities Caused by Solar Geoengineering’, Environmental Research Letters 9 doi: 10.1088/1748–9326/9/7/074013 Kump, Lee R. et al. (2013) The Earth System (3rd edition) Pearson Kunzig, Robert and Broecker, Wallace S. (2008) Fixing Climate: The Story of Climate Science – and How to Stop Global Warming Profile Lamb, Hubert Horace (1971) ‘Climate-Engineering Schemes to Meet a Climatic Emergency’ Earth-Science Reviews 7 87–95 Lamb, Hubert Horace (1972) Climate: Present, Past and Future Methuen Lane, Lee et al. (2007) Workshop Report on Managing Solar Radiation NASA/CP-2007-214558 Langmuir, Charles H. and Broecker, Wally (2012) How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind Princeton University Press Latham, John (1990) ‘Control of Global Warming’ Nature 347 339–340 Latham, John et al. (2008) ‘Global Temperature Stabilization via Controlled Albedo Enhancement of Low-Level Maritime Clouds’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 366 3969–3987 Latham, John et al. (2014) ‘Marine Cloud Brightening: Regional Applications’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 372 doi: 10.1098/rsta.2014.0053 Latour, Bruno (2011) ‘Love Your Monsters’ Breakthrough Journal 2 21–28 Lauer, Axel (2009) ‘Assessment of Near-Future Policy Instruments for Oceangoing Shipping: Impact on Atmospheric Aerosol Burdens and the Earth’s Radiation Budget’ Environmental Science and Technology 43 5592–5598 Leach, Gerald (1976) Energy and Food Production IPC Science and Technology Press Lem, Stansilaw (1986) One Human Minute (translated by Catherine S.


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Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, chap. 1. 17. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 18. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 19. Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 20. For example, cybernetics theory formed the base of Noam Chomsky’s work. He rose to fame by redefining the study of linguistics, and helped spark the “cognitive revolution” by positing that human language was produced by what was essentially a specialized language computer module in the human brain—like a sound card plugged into a mother board.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

For a historical account of neoliberal ideas, see Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For a theoretical account of neoliberalism as a political project, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015).


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The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire by Wikileaks

affirmative action, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, energy transition, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, F. W. de Klerk, facts on the ground, failed state, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, high net worth, invisible hand, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liberal world order, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Northern Rock, nuclear ambiguity, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game, éminence grise

On the drawbacks of financialization for productive investment, see Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London/New York: Verso, 2013). 61Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism, pp. 216–19. 62“Conclusion,” in “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States,” February 2011, at gpo.gov. 63David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), p. 86. 64Panitch and Gindin, Making of Global Capitalism, pp. 236–7. 65Ibid., pp. 310–30. See also Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Greg Albo, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010); Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London/New York: Verso, 2013). 66Tony Wood, “Good Riddance to New Labour,” New Left Review II/62 (March–April 2010). CHAPTER 5: US WAR CRIMES AND THE ICC 1Lesley Wroughton, “US, Afghans Agree Most of Pact, Elders to Make Final Decision,” Reuters, October 13, 2013, at reuters.com. 2Josh Dougherty, “When Victimless Crimes Matter and Victims Don’t: The Trial of Bradley Manning,” Iraq Body Count, August 2, 2013, at iraqbodycount.org. 3Glen Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful (New York: Metropolitan, 2011). 4White House, “Statement of President Barack Obama on Release of OLC Memos,” April 16, 2009, at whitehouse.gov. 5White House, “Statement by the President Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” December 9, 2014, at whitehouse.gov. 6John R.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Sherwin (2006) American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Vintage Books, New York: 62. 7. Upton Sinclair (1965) The Jungle, Dover Publications: 32. 8. Quoted in Peter Watson (2000) A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Minds—A History, Phoenix Press, London: 81. 9. Philip Mirowski (2002) Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 203, 204. 10. Johan van Overtveldt (2007) The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionised Economics and Business, Agate Books, Chicago: 9. 11. Ibid: 91. 12.


pages: 1,197 words: 304,245

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Snow) 16 Two New Sciences (Galileo Galilei) 296, 304, 417, 515 two spheres/one sphere theories (Earth) 113–21, 124–5, 126–7, 128–43, 245, 467 see also Earth Tycho’s nova 13, 192 see also Brahe, Tycho Uccello, Paolo 179 underdetermination 515 United Kingdom 49 United Provinces 68n units of measurement 234–5, 258–9 see also measurement Universae naturae theatrum (Jean Bodin) 132, 134, 141 universities 136 Urania propitia (Maria Cunitz) 6n Uraniborg 196 Uranus 99 Urban VIII, Pope 216 Urbino 175–6 Uriana 307 Ursus 93–4, 96 vacuums 332–5, 339–41 Aristotle denies 69, 177, 300, 311–12, 320 barometer and 245 Boyle and 349–52 competing views 105, 246 Descartes and 366, 371, 439 experiments 77n, 101, 294, 296, 336 explanations 392 laboratories and nature 323 Pascal’s unfinished treatise 297–8 Sarrotti’s efforts 477 steam and 491 Torricellian tubes 324 Vadianus, Joachim Aristotle’s fallibility 523 Earth’s centre of gravity 138 experience and 247 Habes lector 128 India and Africa as antipodes 137 man of many talents 125 van Helmont, Jean Baptiste Boyle influenced by 294, 297 garlic and magnets 279 Jesuits enraged by 291 ‘theory’, use of word 395 weapon salve book 287, 289, 292 Vanini, Giulio Cesare 75 vanishing point 176–9 ‘Vanity of Authors, The’ (Samuel Johnson) 474 Vanity of Dogmatizing, The (Joseph Glanvill) 295, 512n Variation of the Compass, The (William Borough) 331 Vasari, Giorgio 36, 167 Vaucanson, Jacques de 439, 440 Venice 8, 106, 215, 524 Venus 224–9 as seen from earth 526 changes in apparent size 148 distances from sun 145 Galileo begins to observe 222, 224 Galileo publishes on 94 Morning Star and Evening Star 66, 91 phases discovered 24n, 194, 197, 245–6, 515, 523 Tycho Brahe’s nova and 13, 192 Venus Seen on the Sun 149n Verbiest, Ferdinand 180, 182 Vergil 454 Vergil, Polydore 65–8, 93, 176, 339 Versailles 496 Vesalius, Andreas 182–6 see also Fabric of the Human Body muscles of the body 185 new fact-grounded science of 302 priority claims and 97 surgical concerns 207 Vespucci, Amerigo Copernicus indebted to 143 ‘discovery’, the word 65 discovery and invention 60 facts, absence of 255 important book on 76 important features of voyages 136 Mundus novus 121 naming of America 98, 99 publication of supposed letters of 59 water and earth 124 vestiges 410, 529 Vesuvius, Mount 301 Vicentinis, Alexander de 279 Vickers, Brian 355 Vikings 57, 93 Villani, Filippo 451 ‘Visible Hand, A’ (Philip Mirowski) 520n Visigoths 451 ‘Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’ (Bruno Latour) 302 Vitruvius Cesariano’s commentary 177, 178 diagrams lost 183–4n 1521 translation 305n on Pythagoras and Archimedes’ discoveries 67n, 80, 100–1 painting of stage sets 77 perspective painting and 251 Roman machinery 435, 437 Serlio popularizes 200 Vitruvius Teutsch (Johannes Petreius) vi Viviani, Vincenzo 335–6 Vögelin, Johannes 192 Voltaire women readers 474 works by 237, 396 writes on English science 10, 448 von Guericke, Otto 343, 491, 502, 506 Vulgar Errors (Pseudoxia epidemica) (Thomas Browne) 254, 304 Vulgate 59 Wacker, Mathias 211, 214 Waldseemüller, Martin Copernicus indebted to 142 discovering America?


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

‘Experience in state welfare has influenced academic thinking and public policy in America more than in Britain’, lamented Seldon, who cited Milton Friedman and Edward Banfield as cases of the former, Senator Daniel Moynihan of the latter: ‘Letters’, 12 May 1973. See Keith Tribe, ‘Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930–1980’, in The Road from Mount Pèlerin, eds. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Cambridge 2009, p. 89. 54.Eurocurrency markets undermined the Bretton Woods system, since they operated without reference to the official, gold-backed value of the US dollar. For the competitive deregulatory pressures they exerted on policymakers, and their role in the formation of a transatlantic ‘City-Bank-Treasury’ – ‘Federal Reserve-Wall Street-Treasury’ nexus, see J.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

. —, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches (Oxford, 2013). Trentmann, Frank, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008). Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (Harmondsworth, 1978). Tribe, Keith, ‘Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930–1980’, in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009), pp. 68–7. Turner, John (ed.), Businessmen and Politics (London, 1984). Twigge, S. R., The Early Development of Guided Weapons in the United Kingdom 1940–1960 (Amsterdam, 1993).


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Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow by Tim Jackson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, biodiversity loss, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, secular stagnation, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, Works Progress Administration, World Values Survey, zero-sum game


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance


pages: 453 words: 122,586

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market by Nicholas Wapshott

2021 United States Capitol attack, Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, lockdown, low interest rates, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market bubble, market clearing, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Other venues where I was able to try out some of this material were meetings in Ferrara and Milan (Bocconi University) in 1 9 9 1 ; the III Curso de Historia de la Técnica in the Universidad de Salamanca in 1992 (organizers Julio Sanchez Gomez and Guillermo Mira); a Convegno in 1993 of the Società Italiana degli Storici dell'Economia (Vera Zamagni, secretary) on the theme o f "Innovazione e Sviluppo"; several sessions of the Economic History Workshop at Harvard; the " Jornadas Bancarias" o f the Asociaciôn de Bancos de la Republica Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1993 on "Las Estrategias del Desarrollo"; a congress in Hull, England, in 1 9 9 3 (Economic History Society, Tawney Lecture); a conference in Cambridge University on "Technological Change and Economic Growth" (Emma Rothschild, organizer) in 1993; Jacques Marseille and Maurice Lévy-Leboyer's colloquium (Institut d'Histoire économique, Paris, 1 9 9 3 ) on "Les performances des entreprises françaises au X X siècle"; a conference on "Convergence or Decline in British and American Economie History" at Notre Dame University in 1994 (Edward Lorenz and Philip Mirowski organizers, Donald McCloskey promoter); a session on the Industrial Revolution (John Komlos organizer) at the Eleventh International Economic History Congress in Milan in 1994; and a session at the Social Science History Association in Adanta in 1994. Also lectures in the universities o f Oslo and Bergen in 1995 (Kristine Bruland and Fritz Hodne, organizers); a symposium in Paris in 1995 on the work of Alain Peyrefitte ( "Valeurs, Comportements, Développement, Modernité,"^Raymond Boudon organizer) dealing inter alia with regional differences in European economic development; further symposia in 1995 on "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" in Reggio Emilia and the Bocconi University in Milan (Franco Amatori, organizer).


pages: 611 words: 130,419

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra