Quotes from “Intellectual Confusion on Morals and Economics”

By Frank Knight (1935)

• The familiar diagram showing the intersection of an ascending and a descending curve (typically called “supply” and “demand”) is a picture of the action of any two opposed elastic forces.#
  EconomicsMethodology
• Practically speaking, to call a situation hopeless is identical with calling it ideal.#
  Proverb
• The economic man, knowing what he wanted and striving intelligently and ruthlessly to secure it in the maximum degree, would not be a social man and could neither come into existence in society nor live in society.#
• The main, most serious problem of social order and progress is beyond both and all these—the problem of having the rules obeyed, or preventing cheating. As far as I can see there is no intellectual solution of that problem. No social machinery of “sanctions” will keep the game from breaking up in a quarrel, or a fight (the game of being a society can rarely just dissolve!) unless the participants have an irrational preference to having it go on even when they seem individually to get the worst of it.#