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).
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).
External links
- The Frank H. Knight Page
- Concise Encyclopedia of Economics: Frank Hyneman Knight
- Profile of Frank Knight at the History of Economic Thought website.
