 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. 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. 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. 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." Cassidy Paul Krugman replies to John Cassidy: I think that David Warsh's 1994 in the Boston Globe says it all. 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. He explained that while he had become aware of some other people working on increasing returns, trying to put them in would have pulled his story line out of shape. ... Now, I will admit to many sins, not the least of them being a profound ignorance of graduate-level economics; I spent my graduate-school career in the physics department instead, writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the quantum-field theory of elementary particle collisions at relativistic energies. However, I am not so ignorant of the canons of journalism (and of common sense) that I would take a plausible fellow like Brian Arthur at face value without checking up on him. Which brings me to Professor Krugman's letter, and my reply.
 Paul Krugman
 M. Mitchell Waldrop  John Cassidy  Paul Krugman  Kenneth J. Arrow