The Economy That Keeps Becoming

Abstract

In 1983 an economist at Stanford finished a paper about why one technology wins over another. W. Brian Arthur was born in Belfast, trained in electrical engineering and operations research, and came to economics with an engineer's habit of asking what a system actually does rather than what it ought to do. The paper argued something that sounds harmless today. When a technology becomes more attractive the more people adopt it, small and accidental early events can decide which technology the whole market ends up using, and the winner need not be the better one. By Arthur's own later account, the leading American journals declined it for years. It appeared in The Economic Journal in March 1989, under the title "Competing Technologies, Increasing Returns, and Lock-In by Historical Events". The six-year wait is his story, told in the preface to his 1994 collection, and it is worth holding loosely; journals reject papers for many reasons. What is not in doubt is the paper itself, and what it asked economists to give up.