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Fearful Serendipity
What are the odds that the two books on economics I am reading right now, one published in 1989, the other published just months ago, would both begin with the same quotation from the Argentinian essayist and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges? The specific quotation is taken from the opening of Borges’ 1962 essay “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”, and reads:
It may be that universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors.
The books are: More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics by Philip Mirowski, and The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. I’ll have more to say about both as I progress…
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