 What is the educational background of the person who wrote “Complexity”?
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." 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. 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. Among the sources quoted in that piece were the then-chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (Joseph Stiglitz), a governor of the Federal Reserve Board (Laurence Meyer), and a well-known Harvard professor (Gregory Mankiw). 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. "In the early 1980s, Paul David and his Stanford colleague Brian Arthur asked that question, and quickly realized that it led them into surprisingly deep waters. What Paul David, Brian Arthur, and a growing number of other economists began to realize in the late seventies and early eighties was that stories like that of the typewriter keyboard are, in fact, pervasive in the economy." Evidently, Krugman felt four years ago that Arthur's contribution was important enough to merit a prominent mention in his book. Now, he dismisses the same work, saying it "didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know." The eminent MIT professor, whose early academic work received widespread media attention, is far too generous a scholar to succumb to such pettiness. --John As a professional journalist, I found his points well taken--even when he cites my own book, Complexity as a classic example of the gullibility genre. Among many other things, Complexity tells the story of the Irish-born economist Brian Arthur and how he came to champion a principle known as "increasing returns."
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