Bart Wilson quotes from the conclusion of Frank Knight’s The Ethics of Competition.
man’s relations with his fellow man are on a totally different footing from his relations with the objects of physical nature and to give up, except within recognized and rather narrow limits, the naïve project of carrying over a technique which has been successful in the one set of problems and using it to solve another set of a categorically different kind.
In 1924, this statement evidently did not affect the direction taken by the economics profession. Perhaps we might be more receptive to it today.
Brilliant. 90 years before I observed “economics is different because the agents – people – have volition – while the agents in physics (particles) do not”
By the way, any study of the history of physics and astronomy will reveal that a lot of really smart and creative people were really wrong for a very long time (until quite recently it turns out.) And even sound physics like Newtonian mechanics have to be adjusted and corrected every so often (see Einstein….)
Sounds like a preemptive critique on Isaac Asimov’s fictional “psychohistory”. I wonder if Asimov read Frank Knight or anything similar when he invented the idea of psychohistory.