 Who does John Cassidy refer to as the “Santa Fe professor”?
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. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." 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. "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.
 Brian Arthur
 Joel Klein  Brian Arthur  Daniel Rubinfeld  Paul Krugman