==================== HES POSTING ==================== Greg Ransom asked about the use of Knight's Risk, Uncertainty and Profit as a textbook. Outside of the LSE, I have found no evidence that Knight's book was used as a textbook. It frequently appeared on the reading list of courses beyond the introductory level, but was not used as the major text. At the LSE, Robbins used Knight's book first (sometime in the late 1920s?, perhaps through the suggestion of Allyn Young, who had supervised the book as a dissertation?), and its use continued when Hayek joined him in teaching theory. It was the classroom use of Risk, Uncertainty and Profit at the LSE that prompted the 1933 reprint of the book in the LSE Reprint series -- the US publisher discontinued the book and Robbins/Hayek needed to keep it in print (records at the LSE show that Risk, Uncertainty and Profit was the sales leader in the LSE Reprint series throughout the 1930s and 1940s by a large margin, but that probably reflects its use in the LSE course). Knight himself used Ely's text when he taught introductory economics at the University of Iowa in the 1920s. He supplemented Ely with a set of handouts which he obviously intended to make into a textbook, and in fact Allyn Young proofread several chapters of Knight's "text" in the 1920s before he died. Knight's thoughts of publishing a textbook to compete with Ely's died with Young -- who had suggested he pursue the project. Knight did try two more times to create a textbook (once in the late 1930s and again in the mid-1940s) but neither project was completed. The supplemental material Knight wrote during the 1920s at Iowa was adopted in the College of the University of Chicago as required reading for the general social science course that Harry Gideonese and others created in the early 1930s (after Knight's move to Chicago in 1928). A set of four short chapters, Knight's material formed the basic intro to economics that students in the General Social Science course read until well into the 1940s. The material also served as background reading for the divisional course in economics that Henry Simons taught, and eventually was published as The Economic Organization in 1951 (without Knight's permission!). That work is generally known as Knight's text, although he never saw it as more than an outline of his planned text! Ross B. Emmett Manager, Electronic Information, History of Economics Society Augustana University College e-mail: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmer ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]