Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on October 3, 2020
… is from pages 82-83 of Vol. 19 (Ideas, Persons, and Events [2001]) of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan; specifically, it’s from Jim’s 1991 paper “Frank H. Knight,” a remembrance of his great mentor at the University of Chicago:
As economists came to be captured both by the fascination of mathematical manipulation and by the technology of computational possibilities, they had less time for serious consideration of the issues address by Knight, who objected, and strenuously, to the “scientification” of his disciplinary base. Analytical rigor was not to be equated with conversion into symbolic language, and the reality of human interaction was far too complex for much to be learned from the empirical testing of hypotheses analogous to the procedures that describe the activities of the physical scientists.
DBx: Buchanan, who fully shared Knight’s correct understanding that scientism is false science, was born 101 years ago today, October 3rd.
Comments
