 Who seems to be writing the most falsehoods?
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. 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. It was Klein's words, not those of Arthur, that prompted me to use Arthur in the lead of the story. I wrote no such thing, and Arthur has never, to my knowledge, claimed any such thing. 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. The quotes in question came from Arthur, and they were based on his recollections of two meetings that he attended some years ago. The fact of the matter is that I spend much of my life reading the work of mainstream economists, speaking to them, and trying to find something they have written that might interest the general public.
 Paul Krugman
 M. Mitchell Waldrop  John Cassidy  Paul Krugman  Kenneth J. Arrow