In contrast with conventional histories of “economic rationality,” in this book we propose that the history of modern microeconomics is better organized as the treatment of information in postwar economics. Beginning with a brief primer on the nature of information, we then explore how economists first managed their rendezvous with it, tracing its origins to the Neoliberal Thought Collective and Friedrich Hayek. The response to this perceived threat was mounted by the orthodoxy at the Cowles Commission, leading to at least three distinct model strategies. But the logic of the models led to multiply cognitively challenged agents, which then logically led to a stress on markets to rectify those weaknesses. Unwittingly, the multiple conceptions of agency led to multiple types of markets; and the response of the orthodoxy was to shift research away from previous Walrasian themes to what has become known as market design. But internal contradictions in the market design programs led to a startling conclusion: just like their agents, the orthodox economists turned out to be not as smart as they had thought. A little information had turned out to be a dangerous thing.

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In recent years, science studies scholars have critically examined several methods used by the pharmaceutical industry to exert control over knowledge about drugs. Complementary literatures on 'medical neoliberalism' and 'neoliberal science' draw attention to the economic ideas justifying such methods of organizing knowledge, and in so doing suggest that neoliberal thinkers may play an important role in developing them. As yet, the nature of this role remains unexplored. Relying on heretofore-unexamined archival evidence, this article establishes a direct link between the Chicago School of Economics and the mobilization of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1970s. It argues that economists affiliated with the Chicago School of Economics sought to influence pharmaceutical policy and science and constructed institutions to do so. These institutions--most notably the Center for the Study of Drug Development--remain highly influential. This article contributes to a historical understanding of how neoliberal ideas came to assume prominence in pharmaceutical policy, the management of science, and scientific practice.

Recent work such as Steven Levitt's Freakonomics has prompted economic methodologists to reevaluate the state of relations between economics and its neighboring disciplines. Although this emerging literature on 'economics imperialism' has its merits, the positions advanced within it have been remarkably divergent: some have argued that economics imperialism is a fiction; others that it is a fact attributable to the triumph of neoclassical economics; and yet others that the era of economics imperialism is over. We believe the confusion results in part from a lack of historical understanding about the nature and aims of economics imperialists. We seek to improve historical understanding by focusing on the activities of a cadre of economists at the epicenter of economics imperialism, the University of Chicago. These activities -led, in the first instance, by Aaron Director and, in the second, by George Stiglerstemmed from the effort to forge a new liberalism or a 'neoliberalism.' We then consider Steven Levitt's Freakonomics in light of the insights gained from our historical study. Our analysis leads us to question each of the three positions on economics imperialism held by economic methodologists.