 What was Brian Arthur’s claim to fame?
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. 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. 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. 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. Paul David, an economic historian who wrote a famous paper about how the QWERTYUIOP typewriter keyboard evolved and, you guessed it, Brian Arthur.
 An economist who applied an understanding of increasing returns to high-technology markets.
 An economist who applied an understanding of increasing returns to high-technology markets.  The author of “Complexity.”  A founder of modern economics.  A scholar of international trade who was primarily responsible for the rediscovering of increasing returns.