"We have taken science for realist painting," writes Bruno Latour, "imagining that it made an exact copy of the world. The sciences do something else entirely paintings too, for that matter. Through successive stages they link us to an aligned, transformed, constructed world." (1999, pp. 78-79) If finance theory is one of Latour's sciences and this book's conjecture is that it is then simply to praise it is not to add much to humanity's conversations about markets, and simply to denounce it is to coarsen those conversations. To try to understand how finance theory has "aligned, transformed [and] constructed" its world which is also everyone's world, the world of investment, savings, pensions, growth, development, wealth, and poverty may, in contrast, contribute a little to conversations about markets.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 120