 Where was Brian Arthur born?
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. 2) Krugman wrote: "Cassidy's article tells the story of how Stanford Professor Brian Arthur came up with the idea of increasing returns." 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. 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 David, an economic historian who wrote a famous paper about how the QWERTYUIOP typewriter keyboard evolved and, you guessed it, Brian Arthur. "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." Doubtless, this change in attitude on Krugman's part is unconnected to the fact that Arthur has started to receive some public recognition. 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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