Review of Verena Halsmayer’s Managing Growth in Miniature: Solow’s Model as an Artifact, 2024, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.279

Recent work in the history of twentieth-century economics has fruitfully characterized a distinct applied or engineering approach to economics (Cherrier 2014; Duarte and Giraud 2020; Shenk 2023). This approach is specifically associated with the department of economics at MIT, with such luminaries as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Lawrence Klein, Franco Modigliani, Stanley Fischer, and Myron Scholes. The new book by Verena Halsmayer is both an addition to the mostly appreciate literature of this distinct MIT-style, as well as a more critical treatment. The book takes the Solow-growth model as exemplary of the pragmatic MIT-style and relies on theories and concepts from science studies to develop a broader and at the same time more distant and critical perspective on it.

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