 Do Cassidy and Arrow feel the same way about Krugman?
Letter from John Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy Letter from M. Mitchell Waldrop Paul Krugman replies to M. Mitchell Waldrop Letter from Kenneth J. Arrow Letter from Ted C. Fishman David Warsh's July 3, 1994, Boston Globe Letter from John Cassidy: Paul Krugman loves to berate journalists for their ignorance of economics, particularly his economics, but on this occasion, I fear, his logic is more addled than usual. 1) Krugman claims that my opening sentence--"In a way, Bill Gates's current troubles with the Justice Department grew out of an economics seminar that took place thirteen years ago, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government"--is "pure fiction." Perhaps so, but in that case somebody should tell this to Joel Klein, the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." (As Krugman notes, one reason for this was technical, not ideological. Allowing for the possibility of increasing returns tends to rob economic models of two properties that economists cherish: simplicity and determinism. 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. Krugman apart, virtually every economist I have spoken to, including Daniel Rubinfeld, a former Berkeley professor who is now the chief economist at the Justice Department's antitrust division, told me this was the case. 4) Krugman appears to suggest that I made up some quotes, a charge that, if it came from a more objective source, I would consider to be a serious matter. In effect, he is accusing Brian Arthur, a man he calls a "nice guy," of being a fabricator or a liar. After Krugman's article appeared, the Santa Fe professor called me to say that he still recalled the meetings in question as I described them. Krugman, as he admits, wasn't present at either of the meetings. 5) For a man who takes his own cogitations extremely seriously, Krugman is remarkably cavalier about attributing motives and beliefs to others. "Cassidy has made it clear in earlier writing that he does not like mainstream economists, and he may have been overly eager to accept a story that puts them in a bad light," he pronounces. 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.
 Yes - They both think he wrote inaccurate statements about people
 No - Arrow finds him less offensive than Cassidy  Yes - They both think he was misinformed  No - Cassidy thinks he's a liar, but Arrow doesn't  Yes - They both think he wrote inaccurate statements about people