Pricing the Future in the Seventeenth Century: Calculating Technologies in Competition.

Time is money. But how much? What is money in the future worth to you today? This question of "present value" arises in myriad economic activities, from valuing financial securities to real estate transactions to governmental cost-benefit analysis-even the economics of climate change. In modern capitalist practice, one calculation offers the only "rational" way to answer: compound-interest discounting.

For What It's Worth: Historical Financial Bubbles and the Boundaries of Economic Rationality.

This essay is a historical and epistemological exploration of a traditionally crazy economic event: the financial bubble. Venturing into two different moments in the history of economic thinking, it investigates financial bubbles as epistemic frontiers, where rationality has reached its limits. The first half forays into late twentieth-century economics.

Focus: Bounded Rationality and the History of Science. Introduction.

Historians of science see knowledge and its claimants as constrained by myriad factors. These limitations range from the assumptions and commitments of scientific practitioners to the material and ideational contexts of their practice. The precise nature of such limits and the relations among them remains an open question in the history of science.