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Frank Knight

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Frank Knight

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Also known as Frank Hyneman Knight, Frank H. Knight

American economist (1885-1972)

Person · Open Library

Born
1885
Died
1972
Works
16

Top works

  • Bertrand Russell on power
  • The economic order and religion
  • Economic freedom and social responsibility
  • Intelligence and democratic action
  • The ethics of competition, and other essays

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
US
Active from
1915-12-12
Active to
1998-05-14

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
384
Total plays
2,765

Tags

Hip-HopUSAFrank KnightBrooklynSleep513

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Frank+Knight">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Frank Knight

Quotes

  • Most striking feature... is the author’s failure to understand the elementary mechanics of the competitive economic organization.
  • [Weber] is the only one who really deals with the problem of causes or approaches the material from that angle that can alone yield an answer to such questions, that is, the angle of comparative history in the broad sense.
  • Of the American institutionalists, his most generous comments concerned Commons’s work, work that he regarded as hopelessly unsystematic but highly ‘suggestive and valuable’
  • Economics and ethics naturally come into rather intimate relations with each other since both recognizedly deal with the problem of value.
  • [In 1932, Lionel Robbins declared economics ‘the science of choice’ (Robbins 1932). In the same year, when students at the University of Chicago opened their social sciences course reader, they read Knight’s response:] Such definitions come too near to saying that economics is the science of things generally, of everything that men are for practical reasons interested in. Such a definition is useless and misleading
  • A civilization which is dominated by this matter-of-fact insight must prevail against any cultural scheme that lacks this element. This characteristic of western civilization comes to a head in modern science, and finds its highest material expression in the technology of the machine industry.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
Frank Hyneman Knight , ( 1885-11-07 ) 7 November 1885, McLean County, Illinois , U.S.
Died
15 April 1972 (1972-04-15) (aged 86), Chicago, Illinois , U.S.
Spouse
Ethel Verry Knight
Alma mater
Milligan College ( BA ), University of Tennessee ( BA , BS ), Cornell University ( PhD )
Doctoral advisor
Allyn A. Young , Alvin S. Johnson
Influences
Clarence Edwin Ayres , John Bates Clark , Herbert J. Davenport , Max Weber
Discipline
Risk theory, Profit theory , Value theory
School or tradition
Chicago School of Economics
Institutions
Cornell University , University of Chicago , University of Iowa
Doctoral students
Milton Friedman , George Stigler , Charles E. Lindblom , James M. Buchanan
Notable ideas
Knightian uncertainty
Awards
Francis A. Walker Medal (1957)

via Wikipedia infobox

~8 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Frank Hyneman Knight (November 7, 1885 – April 15, 1972) was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School.

Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Frank Knight” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.