Frank Hyneman Knight (November 7, 1885 - April 15, 1972) was an important economist of the twentieth century. He was born in McLean County, Illinois in a devoutly Christian family of farmers. He never completed high school but was admitted in 1905 to the American University in Tennessee. He graduated in 1911 from Milligan College. At the University of Tennessee he obtained a B.S. and an M.A. (the latter in German) in 1913. He then moved to Cornell University for doctoral studies. His initial main subject was philosophy, but he soon switched to economics. He studied with Alvin Johnson and Allyn Young, who both supervised the work on his dissertation, that was completed in 1916 under the title Cost, Value and Profit. Knight would subsequently revise it for publication under its more familiar name Risk, Uncertainty and Profit(1921). is the 311th day of the year (312th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1885 (MDCCCLXXXV) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Saturday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar). ... is the 105th day of the year (106th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Alan Greenspan, former chairman, United States Federal Reserve. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s The 20th century lasted from 1901 to 2000 in the Gregorian calendar (often from (1900 to 1999 in common usage). ... McLean County is a county located in the state of Illinois. ... This article is about the U.S. state of Tennessee. ... Milligan College is a church-related liberal arts college founded in 1866 located in Milligan College, Tennessee. ... The University of Tennessee (UT), sometimes called the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (UT Knoxville or UTK), is the flagship institution of the statewide land-grant University of Tennessee public university system in the American state of Tennessee. ... Cornell redirects here. ... Alvin Saunders Johnson, Ph. ... Allyn Abbott Young (1876—1929), celebrated American economist, was born into a middle_class family in Kenton, Ohio on September 19, 1876 and died aged 52 in London on March 7, 1929, his life cut short by pneumonia during an influenza epidemic. ...
References
Emmett, Ross. "Introduction", in Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, 2 vols., (ed. by Ross Emmett), 1999.
Kasper, Sherryl. The Revival of Laissez-Faire in American Macroeconomic Theory: A Case Study of Its Pioneers (2002), ch 2
White, Harrison C., Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2002).
Frank H. Knight has been called "among the most broad-ranging and influential economists of the twentieth century" and "one of the most eclectic economists and perhaps the deepest thinker and scholar American economics has produced." He stands among the giants of American economists that include Schumpeter and Viner.
Frank H. Knight was one of the founders of the so-called Chicago school of economics, of which Milton Friedman and George Stigler were the leading members from the fifties to the eighties.
Knight was an economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, after which he was emeritus professor until his death.
Though Knight shared the view that economic behavior was identical with rational behavior (1956, 127), and in spite of the fact that Knight made extensive use of the concept of "economic man" himself, he nonetheless indicated a rather significant role for "irrational" factors in the determination of human behavior.
Knight therefore insisted that economics must be based upon the examination of the choices of rational maximizers and, that in doing so, it was able to forge an "exact" science, "which reaches laws as universal as those of mathematics and mechanics" (1976, 135).
Knight's criticism was not, therefore, that the development of economics was misguided or impossible but rather that there were significant limitations to the applicability or usefulness of the economic view of conduct.
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