ABSTRACT
The essay that follows is obviously not Frank H. Knight’s own response to Stigler and Becker’s article; their article was published five years after Knight’s death (Stigler and Becker 1977) and there is no evidence that he was even familiar with the authors’ research programs in household production (see the essays collected in Becker 1976 and 1996) and the economics of information (Stigler 1961) upon which the joint article draws. Rather, what follows is my reconstruction of what Knight would say were he to have had an opportunity to reply to Stigler and Becker’s article at an earlier point in his career. The reply is written in a style common to Knight’s replies and reviews during the 1920s and 1930s – acerbic, deliberately provocative, and engaging the philosophical perspective underlying the authors’ article rather than its theoretical conclusions. To heighten the drama of the reply, I have pretended that it was written about the same time as Stigler and Becker’s article, thereby allowing Knight to “predict” (and lament in advance) the subsequent rise of economics imperialism within the social sciences – a movement directly attributable to the impact Stigler and Becker’s work has had in economics, law, sociology, and political science. Perhaps what is said here is what Knight once said to Stigler and Becker over lunch at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club.
