Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Knight

Knight’s line has the calm, clockwork certainty of a theorem, and that’s exactly the point: he’s distilling markets into a mechanical story where incentives do the pushing and equilibrium is the stopping rule. “Goods move” reads almost like physics. No villains, no heroes, no pleading for virtue - just a force (price differences) and a predictable result (arbitrage that “obliterates” the gap). The phrasing makes profit-seeking sound impersonal and therefore legitimate: it isn’t greed, it’s gravity.

The subtext is a defense of markets as self-correcting systems, but also a warning about what has to be true for that comforting ending (“come to rest”) to arrive. In Knight’s world, frictions are the plot twist: transport costs, information gaps, market power, regulation, risk. If those frictions are small, the story closes neatly. If they’re big, “tending” becomes the key word - convergence is a tendency, not a promise.

Context matters because Knight helped define Chicago-style price theory while also shaping the distinction between measurable “risk” and genuine “uncertainty.” That tension hums under this sentence. Price differences invite movement, but the future doesn’t always cooperate; sometimes goods don’t move because nobody knows what the “higher price” will be tomorrow, or whether it will be paid at all. The quote works because it sells an elegant baseline while quietly reserving the right to say: and when the baseline fails, look for the real-world constraints - not moral failings, not conspiracies, but the hard limits on how markets actually coordinate.