As the economist and economic policy maker Alan Blinder has pointed out, in many respects global economies have in recent decades moved closer to the standard way in which economists model them, with, for example, its assumption of "single-minded concentration on profit maximization." Blinder suspects that "economists ... have bent reality (at least somewhat) to fit their models" (2000, pp. 16, 18). The anthropologist Daniel Miller likewise asserts that "economics has the authority to transform the world into its own image" (1998, p. 196).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 116