William H. Janeway at Project Syndicate:
The detective in a typical British crime procedural would say that Mordecai Kurz “has got form.” An emeritus professor at Stanford University, Kurz received his doctorate in economics from Yale University more than 60 years ago. In 1970, he co-authored a book with Kenneth J. Arrow, a soon-to-be Nobel laureate in economics and among the greatest cross-over mathematician-social scientists ever.
Kurz would go on to establish a distinctive platform for criticizing John Muth and Robert Lucas’s rational expectations hypothesis, demonstrating with rigor that any number of models could be mapped to the historical statistical record to reveal a spectrum of alternative “rational beliefs.” And now, in his book The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age, he brings the same rigor to bear on the question of what shapes income growth and the distribution of wealth in an economy driven by privately owned technological innovations.
Kurz’s theory of “technological market power” distinguishes legally sanctioned monopolies based on innovation from illegal conspiracies that restrain trade.
More here.