The conflation of options pricing with the ophthalmoscope made great semiotic play with the connotations of technological “improvements,” which somehow enhanced efficiency and efficacy; and soon thereafter one began to hear of dedicated “financial engineers” (aka “quants”) tinkering and fine-tuning the machinery of Wall Street and London. One conflation soon spawned another: denizens of “science studies,” accustomed as they were to description of technological artifacts, conceived of the notion that they could just as readily apply their expertise to these financial phenomena, since, after all, they were just another species of technological innovation. Thus appeared a whole series of monographs on the “social studies of finance,” most of which tended to recapitulate the accounts of finance already current among the orthodox economists and practitioners in the area; perhaps inadvertently, they tended to reinforce the cultural Geist that the banking sector sported a teleology of internal scientific logic of development. It then comes as no surprise that it was a sociologist of science who came up with a thoroughly internalist and technical account of the causes of the crisis, devoid of all political economy.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 956