External Faculty Member, Santa Fe Institute and Coopers & Lybrand Fellow
W Brian Arthur is an External Faculty Member at the Santa Fe Institute and Coopers & Lybrand Fellow. From 1983 to 1996, he was Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Economics and Population Studies at Stanford University. He holds a PhD from Berkeley in Operations Research and has other degrees in economics, engineering and mathematics.
Arthur pioneered the modern study of positive feedbacks or increasing returns in the economy – in particular, their role in magnifying small, random events in the economy. His ideas have come much to the public eye with the recent legal case of the US Department of Justice vs Microsoft. His work on increasing returns won him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and the Schumpeter Prize in Economics in 1990.
Arthur is also one of the pioneers of the new science of complexity. His main interests are the economics of high technology; how business evolves in an era of high technology; cognition in the economy; and financial markets. Arthur was the first director of the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico; he currently serves on the Board of the Institute. He is a consultant to Citicorp, McKinsey and Co, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Intel, among others, and is a frequent keynote speaker.
Arthur’s latest book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, is an elegant and powerful theory of the origins and evolution of technology. It accomplishes for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to ‘thinking outside the box’, or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces – themselves technologies – that already exist.