Frank Knight Quotes
It is true practically if not altogether without exception that the changes studied by any science tend to equilibrate or neutralize the forces which bring them about, and finally to come to rest.
Knight, Frank H. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Houghton Mifflin, 1921, p. 15.
For many people, especially, bright and educated people, science has been an escape from unstable, political situations.
This is a classic technique used by politicians of the left and right when they are faced with scientific findings that do not comport with their ideological, religious, or political view of the world. Namely to point out that the science is not settled and the field is still in flux. Therefore, they are, that it si too early to make public policy on the basis of that. And they have little trouble finding that the scientists themselves who did the research that they do not like are the first ones to say that the science is in flux. For ALL SCIENCE IS IN FLUX and new findings are being introduced literally every day in most scientific fields. That very rarely does the new knowledge contradict the older science in huge and dramatic ways. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity turned the field of physics and mechanics upside down but it did not change the calculations that engineers and scientists would make in over 99 percent of their measurements. Within a few decades of Einsteins theory being published, it was demonstrated to be wrong—not completely wrong, but inadequate to measure the mechanics of tiny partials like electrons adn quarks. Quantum mechanics was born. And every week or so these days there is more knowledge that makes slight changes in the way we understand quantum mechanics. No science has ever remained settled for 1000 years since the beginning of scientific inquiry, By the 19th century most science did not remain settled for 100 years. In the 20th century “settled” science rarely lasted more than a decade, and in the 21st century, few are stable for even a year.
Frank Hyneman Knight 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. Paul Samuelson named Knight (along with Harry Gunnison Brown, Allyn Abbott Young, Henry Ludwell Moore, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Jacob Viner, and Henry Schultz) as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.
