For thirty years the official story of general equilibrium went like this: Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu, working independently at first, then joining forces, proved that Adam Smith was right, and the rest is history....
It was some time in the 1970s that [E. Roy] Weintraub first became aware that [Lionel] McKenzie, by then of the University of Rochester, had in the early 1950s proved the same result as had Arrow and Debreu, and slightly earlier at that, but somehow had failed to share in the enormous credit assigned or their famous result. ...
... McKenzie had succeeded in rehabilitating the kernel of his derailed Princeton thesis, and, as something of an afterthought, setting out an existence proof in “On Equilibrium of World Trade in Graham’s Model of World Trade and Other Competitive Systems.” The paper appeared in Econometrica in April 1954. ...
Debreu arrived from Paris in 1950 .... He and Arrow began working on the equilibrium proof separately; when learning of each other’s work, they threw their lots in together and presented their results at the 1952 meetings of the Econometric Society, in Chicago – a day after McKenzie had talked about his work. Their paper, “Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy,” appeared in Econometrica eighteen months later, more general than that of McKenzie, but three months after his.
Weintraub learned all this in the late ’70s, in the course of retooling as a historian of economic thought. The result was a long review article, “The Existence of a Competitive General Equilibrium, 1930-1954,” in the Journal of Economic Literature, in 1983. McKenzie’s name was at last on its way to being firmly appended to the famous proof — small comfort, perhaps, considering the Nobel Prize that Debreu would receive in 1985 for his contributions to mathematical economics. ...
Weintraub kept after it. He noticed that the principals had been somewhat reluctant to discuss the details surrounding their respective proofs. He badgered them, gradually learned that Debreu had attended McKenzie’s session and hadn’t told Arrow about it. The matter of priority clearly bothered McKenzie, too, not a lot, but such that he returned to it in conversations with friends. In the only autobiographical account he gave, delivered orally at Keio University, in Japan, in June 1998, on the occasion of an honorary degree, he stuck to the stoic account of his originality he had given Weintraub for his 1983 article.
By the early ’00s, Wientraub was back in the hunt. Arrow’s account of Debreu’s omission was now in the record. Much archival material had become available. Weintraub took a second stab at assessing the record, in 2002, this time in collaboration with a mathematically sophisticated student, Ted Gayer. The behind-the-scenes background of the Arrow-Debreu paper was coming clearer all the time.
Enter a young German researcher, Till Duppe, with access to the Debreu papers, maintained at the University of California at Berkeley, where Debreu had taught for thirty years. The two met via an Internet conference and agreed to collaborate. Further details had emerged, including an astonishing fact: the anonymous referee, who bottled UP McKenzie’s submission toEconometrica for a critical time, while Arrow and Debreu tidied up their proof, was none other than Debreu himself; and Debreu hadn’t disclosed his conflict of interest to the editor, Robert Solow. Debreu’s conduct was thus revealed as having been dishonorable....
Weintraub published a third article, this time in theJournal of Economic Perspectives, surveying the concealed flow and ebb of tensions between Debreu and McKenzie over the years. McKenzie, who died in 2010, lived long enough to read the last draft.
Another lesson: Keep your... enemies closer.
My next post will be a list of all the papers for which I feel slighted with the name of the person(s) for which my paranoid delusions tell me were the referee and held it up while their paper got published and took prominence.
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