Chapter 4 situates Solow’s model in the heterogenous landscape of mathematical economics in the early 1950s. Robert Solow got acquainted with different strands of structuralist and mathematical reasoning before he devised the model more or less incidentally in the context of teaching engineering students at MIT. Here, I describe Solow’s model as a miniature not of the world but of other models. Its smaller scale and reduced mathematical form fit older mathematical economics while, at the same time, it related to the more sophisticated systems of proof and proposition characteristic of general equilibrium theory. While rigor and axiomatization also played a role in the construction of the miniature, the related style of modeling did not revolve around the austere beauty of proposition and proof. Rather, it centered on creating simple and manageable artifacts that upheld the promise of being useful tools for economic governance. The efficient shape of Solow’s model made it a particularly talkative artifact. Not least, it provided a starting point for a number of stories, including what economists themselves called “fables” or “parables” about growth.

In the years following FDA approval of direct-to-consumer, genetic-health-risk/DTCGHR testing, millions of people in the US have sent their DNA to companies to receive personal genome health risk information without physician or other learned medical professional involvement. In Personal Genome Medicine, Michael J. Malinowski examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of this development. Drawing from the past and present of medicine in the US, Malinowski applies law, policy, public and private sector practices, and governing norms to analyze the commercial personal genome sequencing and testing sectors and to assess their impact on the future of US medicine. Written in relatable and accessible language, the book also proposes regulatory reforms for government and medical professionals that will enable technological advancements while maintaining personal and public health standards.

Chapter 8 is a case study focusing on Paul Samuelson’s essay, An Exact Consumption-Loan Model of Interest with or without the Social Contrivance of Money, critical responses, and some of the discussion and applications it spawned. This case study illustrates the claims concerning the structure and strategy of economics presented in chapter 7, and it is of special interest because of the way in which normative issues intrude into what purports to be a positive investigation.

In the second half of the Twentieth Century, Mill’s deductive method was criticized by defenders of more positivistic or modernist views of economic methodology, which I criticize in chapter 11. A number of economists, including Terence Hutchison, Paul Samuelson, Fritz Machlup, Milton Friedman, and Tjallings Koopmans argued that Mill’s deductive method is insufficiently empirical and that economic models should be judged by the agreement of their implications with economic outcomes. Yet they rarely practiced what they preached. This chapter thus highlights the methodological schizophrenia of many economists, in which methodological pronouncements and practice contradict one another.

From 1948 to mandatory retirement in 1976, Kindleberger taught international economics at MIT, which over that same time grew to become the leading economics department in the world. His original plan was to keep one foot in the world of policy, the better to push for Hansen’s postwar vision of economic development in the Global South. Security clearance trouble, however, put that plan on hold, and forced him instead to embrace a more purely scholarly career. Over time, the increasingly technical character of modern economics pushed him to the fringes of academia, where he reinvented himself as an economic historian.