This article claims to offer “Nine amazing and instructive lessons on the power of breaking the mold, the genius of the unexpected move, the thrill of standing out from the crowd, and the virtues — yes, virtues — of conservatism.” Personally, I found it of little value but the following excerpt makes it worthwhile…
*Economics primer: Frank H. Knight was cochair of the department of economics at the University of Chicago from the 1920s to the late 1940s. In his classic book published in 1921, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, he distinguished between risk and uncertainty. Risk, he argued, was a randomness — as in a game of roulette — whose probability could be determined. Uncertainty implied unknown and perhaps unknowable probabilities. Will human cloning be commonplace in a generation? That’s an uncertainty.
Change per se, Knight wrote, does not drive profit. Just because you operate in a dynamic world doesn’t ensure opportunities to make money. Likewise, a risky situation isn’t necessarily profitable. Since the odds are calculable, they are calculable by anyone and so not unique. But “change may cause a situation out of which profit will be made, if it brings about ignorance of the future.” Profit “is in fact bound up in economic change … it is clearly the result of risk, but only of a unique kind of risk, which is not susceptible of measurement.”
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