 Where was Brian Arthur born?
Krugman's Life of Brian Where it all started: Paul Krugman's "The Legend of Arthur." I am reluctant to dignify his hatchet job with a lengthy reply, but some of his claims are so defamatory that they should be addressed, if only for the record. Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. When I interviewed Klein for my piece about the Microsoft case, he singled out Brian Arthur as the economist who has most influenced his thinking about the way in which high-technology markets operate. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. What I did say in my article was that increasing returns was largely ignored by mainstream economists for much of the postwar era, a claim that simply isn't controversial. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. As long ago as 1939, Sir John Hicks, one of the founders of modern economics, noted that increasing returns, if tolerated, could lead to the "wreckage" of a large part of economic theory.) 3) Pace Krugman, I also did not claim that Arthur bears principal responsibility for the rediscovery of increasing returns by economists in the 1970s and 1980s. As Krugman notes, several scholars (himself included) who were working in the fields of game theory and international trade published articles incorporating increasing returns before Arthur did. My claim was simply that Arthur applied increasing returns to high-technology markets, and that his work influenced how other economists and government officials think about these markets. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a "nice guy," of being a fabricator or a liar. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. I presume this statement refers to a critical piece I wrote in 1996 about the direction that economic research, principally macroeconomic research, has taken over the past two decades. In response to that article, I received dozens of messages of appreciation from mainstream economists, including from two former presidents of the American Economic Association.
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