The Ethic of Competition (Foundations of Higher Education) [Paperback]

Frank Hyneman Knight (Author), Richard Boyd (Introduction)

Product Details

• Paperback: 355 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (January 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560009551
• ISBN-13: 978-1560009559
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,685,752 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's greatest economist, November 15, 2000

By 

Greg Nyquist (Eureka, California USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ethic of Competition (Foundations of Higher Education) (Paperback)

Transaction publishers should be congratulated for making this important book available. Knight has fair claim to be regarded, along with Joseph Schumpeter, as the greatest economist of the 20th century. The primary reason for Knight's greatness is his ability to synthesize economic theory with an empirical sense of actual economic reality. Unlike so many right-wing, pro-free market economists, Knight does not view economic reality solely in terms of abstract models of the market processes. He knows that there is more to economic reality than is to be found in the theories of supply and demand and consumer sovereignty. Although deeply symphathetic to the cause of freedom (including that old bugbear of the Left, economic freedom), Knight never shrinks from criticizing even pro-market ideas. This enables him to understand not merely the weaknesses in these ideas, but also their unique strengths.

Knight also manages to avoid the other major pitfall of economists, especially economists from the Left. He never becomes so excessively wrapped up in the empirical as to become interpretively obtuse. He understands perfectly well that, in the absence of theory, economic facts cannot be understood. He thus avoids the lamentable errors of left-wing economists who, noticing some fact which does not square with the laws of classical economics, decide to throw the entire classical system into the rubbish heap of refuted ideas. But economic laws, Knight would point out, are mere approxtimations measuring tendencies within the economic system.

Those who want to deepen their understanding of economics as it exists in the real world of fact rather than in the heads of shrill ideologues can do no better than to treat themselves to a perusal of "The Ethics of Competition."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Knight as Social Critic, March 23, 2008

By 

James F. Mueller "Lachmanniac" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ethic of Competition (Foundations of Higher Education) (Paperback)

This is an amazing collection of essays by a brilliant econoist. Economics is not written like this anymore. Knight asks questions that seem to be in the back of the mind of every economist, and it is in this book that they are given expression.

Proponents of laissez-faire have claimed Knight as their own. I am puzzled by this. This particular book has done more to question my faith in markets than any other work I have come across. Very briefly, Knight argues in several essays that ends (desires and wants) cannot be taken as given because they are not the ultimate source of action. Individuals do not actually try to satisfy given wants. They are concerned instead with the discovery and pursuit of higher, more enlightened wants. This is a remarkable insight. The market relies for its defense on the principle of efficiency in want satisfaction. And Knight does not question this. He goes much further and questions the very nature of the wants themselves, and arrives at the conclusion that an individualistic competitive market order creates wants that have as their aim emulation and rivarly rather than personal satisfaction and the promotion of happiness. This applies to production as well, with businessmen engaged in a "game" where the goal is to dominate your opponent much like you would in a game of chess.

Another important theme in this book concerns the ethical character of economics. Knight argues that economics is more than a branch of mechanics. And although ethical judgments can never claim to possess the status of objectivity, there is a very real sense in which the actions and motives to which they give rise are influenced by "social ideals." From here, Knight also argues that these social ideals can be used to criticize the outcomes generated by a laissez-faire economic arragement, even if all available alternative economic systems fare no better. Ethical judgment is never "a purely relative matter", but is instead concerned with the question of "ideals."

This book is packed full of insight. But the general theme of the book, I would argue, is this: Traditional debates surrounding the virtues of competing economic systems have focused on the way in which resources are most efficiently allocated in direction of the satisfaction of wants. Knight throws this very important debate into the trash by observing that "wants", commonly understood, are never simply given. Wants are constantly changing and are inherently dynamic. Moreover, Knight writes:

"want-satisfying activity is not in the main directed toward gratifying existing desires sharply defined as data in the conduct problem; it is largely explorative in character."

And further:

"The individual who is acting deliberately is not merely and perhaps not mainly trying to satisfy given desires; there is always really present and operative, though in the background of consciousness, the idea of and desire for a new want to be striven for when the present objective is out of the way. ... [A]ll intelligently conscious activity is directed forward, onward, upward, indefinitely."

Now, according to Knight, these considerations should raise in the mind of the reader the urgent need for additional "ethical" views of value. But for me, these insights do great injustice to the conventional conception of economics as a science concerned with questions of allocative efficiency directed toward the satisfaction of certain wants.