W. Brian Arthur Quotes

United Kingdom, Economist
July 31, 1945

William Brian Arthur is an economist credited with developing the modern approach to increasing returns. He has lived and worked in Northern California for many years. He is an authority on economics in relation to complexity theory, technology and financial markets. He has been on the external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and a Visiting Researcher at the Systems Sciences Lab at PARC. He is credited with the invention of the El Farol Bar problem.

We're facing a danger that economics is rigorous deduction based upon faulty assumptions. Science after science gets that way from time to time. When it does, we're in real trouble.

W. Brian Arthur
- Time
- Real
- Science
When you mathematize something you distill its essence.

W. Brian Arthur

The invisible hand is not perfect. Indeed, the invisible hand is a little bit arthritic ... I'm a believer in free markets, but I think we need to be less naïve. We need to accept that markets give us pretty good solutions, but occasionally they will lock in something inferior.

W. Brian Arthur
- Good
- Pretty
- Free
Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It's important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They're open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn't like perpetual novelty.

W. Brian Arthur
- Important
- May
- Science
Economists got away from really questioning how the world works, how decisions actually got made. If something doesn't conform to neoclassical models ... people are not somehow behaving themselves properly.

W. Brian Arthur
- People
- World
If economics wants to understand the new economy, it not only has to understand increasing returns and the dynamics of instability. It also has to look at cognition itself, something we have never done before in economics.

W. Brian Arthur
- Done