W. Brian Arthur Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Where we observe the predominance of one technology or one economic outcome over its competitors we should thus be cautious of any exercise that seeks the means by which the winner's innate 'superiority' came to be translated into adoption.

W. Brian Arthur
Conventional economic theory is built is built on the assumption of diminishing returns. Economic actions engender a negative feedback that leads to a predictable equilibrium for prices and market shares. Such feedback tends to stabilize the economy because any major changes will be offset by the very reactions they generate. The high oil prices of the 1970s encouraged energy conservation and increased oil exploration, precipitating a predictable drop in prices by the early 1980s. According to conventional theory, the equilibrium marks the best outcome possible under the circumstances: the most efficient use and allocation of resources.

W. Brian Arthur
Increasing-returns economics has roots that go back 70 years or more, but its application to the economy as a whole is largely new.

W. Brian Arthur
In many parts of the economy, stabilizing forces appear not to operate. Instead, positive feedback magnifies the effects of small economic shifts; the economic models that describe such effects differ vastly from the conventional ones. Diminishing returns imply a single equilibrium point for the economy, but positive feedback – increasing returns – makes for many possible equilibrium points. There is no guarantee that the particular economic outcome selected from among the many alternatives will be the best one.

W. Brian Arthur
This paper has attempted to go beyond the usual static analysis of increasing-returns problems by examining the dynamical process that 'selects' an equilibrium from multiple candidates, by the interaction of economic forces and random 'historical events'. It shows how dynamically, increasing returns can cause the economy gradually to lock itself in to an outcome not necessarily superior to alternatives, not easily altered, and not entirely predictable in advance.

W. Brian Arthur
Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one, long, slow collision.
This collision is not new, but more than anything else it is defining our era. Technology is steadily creating the dominant issues and upheavals of our time.

W. Brian Arthur
A technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually 'corner the market' of potential adopters, with the other technologies becoming locked out.

W. Brian Arthur
As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we're part of an ever-changing, interlocking, non-linear, kaleidoscopic world.

W. Brian Arthur
More than anything else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being.

W. Brian Arthur
[Market outcomes] depends on the cumulation of random events.

W. Brian Arthur
Right after we published our first findings, we started getting letters from all over the country saying, "You know, all you guys have done is rediscover Austrian economics"… I admit I wasn't familiar with Hayek and von Mises as the time. But now that I've read them, I can see that this is essentially true.

W. Brian Arthur