On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Chuck Grimes <[email protected]> wrote:
> Doug had Philip Mirowski on about the neoliberal take over of discourse on > economics and politics. Mirowski spent a lot of time on the Mont Pelerin > Society and its think tank connections. I like Mirowski's work a lot, but I saw a recent critical review of his writing that struck a chord with me. Like the author of this review, I too, find Mirowski's work to be a very challenging read. Partly it is because he takes on very ambitious projects (e.g. "Machine Dreams" aims to trace the "cyborg" influence on economics). But at least partly, his writing really is unnecessarily convoluted, and yes, pretentious. Which is really too bad, because he deserves to be very widely read. http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/07/financial-writing ----------------------------snip FINANCIAL books are not renowned for their literary merits. Neverthless, the reader is still entitled to expect something better than the following (from Philip Mirowski's new book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste"): Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis. That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world's worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause. After a semi-colon, the author drones on for a further 32 words, from which *Economist* readers should be spared. -raghu.
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