Science & Tech Quote by Frank Knight

Knight is smuggling a philosophy of order into what looks like a bland methodological note. His claim - that scientific change “tends to equilibrate” the very forces that cause it - is a statement about how we like the world to behave: disturbances arrive, adjustments follow, and the system settles down. It’s the intellectual backbone of equilibrium thinking, dressed up as a near-empirical generalization (“practically if not altogether without exception”) that signals both confidence and caution. He knows the exception matters; he just wants it kept in the margins.

The subtext is a quiet boundary-drawing exercise. If science is defined by its ability to trace processes that neutralize shocks, then chaotic spirals, cumulative causation, and runaway feedback loops look less like central problems and more like awkward outliers. For an economist of Knight’s era - writing in the long shadow of classical mechanics and in the early 20th-century push to make economics “scientific” - equilibrium isn’t just a tool; it’s a legitimacy claim. The world is intelligible because it has resting points.

There’s also an ethical aftertaste. If forces cancel and systems “come to rest,” then markets and institutions can be imagined as self-correcting, with intervention framed as impatience or error. Knight, famously preoccupied with uncertainty, is not naively proclaiming perfection; he’s revealing a deep preference for models where time’s violence is temporary. The line works because it pretends to describe science while quietly prescribing what kinds of change deserve to count as knowledge.