Philip Mirowski

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Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame.

In his book More Heat than Light, Mirowski reveals a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. He traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect on the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics, the modern orthodox theory.

In his book Machine Dreams, Mirowski explores the historical influences of the military and the cyborg sciences on neoclassical economics. The neglected influence of John von Neumann and his theory of automata are key themes throughout the book. Mirowski claims that many of the developments in neoclassical economics in the twentieth century, from game theory to computational economics, are the unacknowledged result of von Neumann's plans for economics. In the work Mirowski expands his own vision for a computational economics, one in which various market types are constructed in a similar fashion to Chomsky's Generative grammar. The role of economics is to explore how various market types perform in measures of complexity and efficiency, with more complicated markets being able to incorporate the effects of the less complex. By complexity Mirowski means something analogous to Computational complexity theory in computer science.