How Many Do You Recognize?

They are all winners of The Economist's annual innovation awards, though how anyone could match this record of achievement every 12 months is beyond me.  I deliberately left of Jeff Bezos as too obvious; also Steve Jobs who gets a (posthumous) 10-year award. Hard to say who is the most visible among the remainder; perhaps Paul Buchheit, Google's "Employee #23," who has his fingerprints on both AdSense and Gmail.  For raw improvement of the human condition, I'd have to give top marks to Koska, whose non-reusable syringe is credited, per the E, with saving 5 million lives since 2001.  I can hear Saint Peter now: I don't se anything interesting on your resume.  Oh, wait...

Who Said It (Economic Man)?

The answer is Frank H. Knight, capo di tutti capi among freshwater economists--and in so many ways a far more subtle thinker than so many of his successors.   It's the opening paragraph of The Economic Organization (1933), famous in folklore as the default alternative to the textbook he never wrote.  Folklore has it that Knight's sketch formed the framework for early editions of Paul Samuelson's textbook.  For a discussion, go here.