Donald MacKenzie

Economics is a world-shaping, not just a world-describing , endeavour. The discipline thus matters not just to economists but to the rest of us, whose world is being shaped.

For nearly a decade, heated debates about science have split academia and sometimes spilled onto the pages of newspapers. Although the ‘science wars’ were well underway by 1996, they came to wider attention in that year when Alan Sokal succeeded in publishing his brilliant pastiche in Social Text. Sokal’s hoax implicitly condemned – and a fair number of further books...

The investment partnership Long-Term Capital Management was set up in 1993 by John Meriwether, previously a successful bond trader and then senior manager at the US investment bank, Salomon Brothers. Meriwether recruited to LTCM, from Salomon and elsewhere, an impressive team of experienced traders and specialists in mathematical finance. Much of its trading was with leading banks, and it largely avoided risky ‘emerging markets’, preferring well-established ones such as those in government bonds of the leading industrial nations. The fund avoided speculation based on hunches. It built carefully researched mathematical models of the markets in which it traded, and invested in a way designed to achieve insulation from market movements, seeking small pricing anomalies from which it could profit. Although it had to borrow large amounts and commit money on a large scale to make an adequate return from these anomalies, LTCM scrupulously measured and controlled the risks it was taking.

In July 1785, Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen assistants. As Jefferson watched, Blanc sorted into bins the pieces of 50 musket flintlocks: ‘tumblers, lock plates, frizzens, pans, cocks, sears, bridals, screws and springs’. From the parts in the bins, Blanc assembled several working gunlocks.‘

It always helps to see the ordinariness of things. Despite the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons remain very un-ordinary in the popular mind. The world’s nuclear arsenals still contain over twenty thousand warheads. Yet nuclear weapons are an ordinary technology and can, like other technologies, become obsolete. They can, perhaps, be abolished. There is even a meaningful sense in which nuclear weapons can be disinvented.