 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. 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.) 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. "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." 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.
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