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An Engine, Not a Camera
How Financial Models Shape Markets
Donald MacKenzie
 Table of Contents
In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.
Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.
MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream—chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America’s financial markets have grown into their current form.
About the Author
Donald MacKenzie is Professor of Sociology (Personal Chair) at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Inventing Accuracy (1990), Knowing Machines (1996), and Mechanizing Proof (2001), all published by the MIT Press. Portions of An Engine, not a Camera won the Viviana A. Zelizer Prize in economic sociology from the American Sociological Association.
| "An Engine, Not a Camera provides an insightful appreciation of the ways in which financial models influence and shape the world they seek to understand."
—Anthony Hopwood, Times Higher Education Supplement "A brilliant, extremely lucid account of the connections between financial economics and the development of futures, options, and derivatives markets between the 1950s and 2001."
—Neil Fligstein, American Journal of Sociology |
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| "In one lifetime modern finance theory has revolutionized the arts of canny investing. MacKenzie knows this exciting story, and he tells it well."
—Paul A. Samuelson, MIT, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (1970)
"Having returned from an audacious incursion into the black box of modern financial markets, Donald MacKenzie shows how economic theory has succeeded in capturing and shaping them. This book will be of substantial interest to specialists in a range of fields including economics, finance theory, economic sociology, and science and technology studies. But MacKenzie's tour de force is to make clear, even to nonspecialists, that through complex technical issues, alternative forms of economic organization can be imagined and discussed."
—Michel Callon, École des Mines de Paris
"Donald MacKenzie has long been one of the world's most brilliant social and historical analysts of science and technology. Here he provides an original, astute, and exhaustively researched account of the development of finance theory and the ways in which it is intertwined with financial markets. An Engine, Not a Camera is essential for anyone interested in markets and the forms of knowledge deployed in them."
—Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Konstanz and University of Chicago
View All Endorsements |
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| Winner of the 2008 Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award given by the American Sociological Association’s section on Economic Sociology.
Winner, 2007 British International Studies Association’s (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG) Book Prize.
Winner of the 2005 John Desmond Bernal Prize awarded jointly by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the Institute for Scientific Information.
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