Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Turning Men’s Evil Intentions to Good Outcomes

One of the most beautiful passages in Scripture is an adult Joseph forgiving his brothers (who, when he was a teenager, had literally sold him into slavery because they were jealous of him): 15When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back […]

Those Silly Austrians Keep Making Econ 201 Errors

I can’t remember the course number for Intro to Micro, but I know I never actually taught “101” so maybe it was 201. Anyway, one of the points I would hammer home with the students was to distinguish between a movement in demand, versus moving along the demand curve. I would warn them not to […]

Jobs That Murphy Doesn’t Want to Do Himself

No, I’m not talking about open borders. Instead I’m talking about this absurd WaPo article on how dumb those British #Brexit supporters were. You’ll notice: They don’t try to show whether most of the Google searches could have been done by non-voters. (I’m not saying this is true; David R. Henderson has some thoughts.) But […]

Mises Defeats the Robot Overlords

My latest FEE article responds to Scott Alexander’s intriguing (but baseless, I think) worries: Yet these are mere quibbles. The real difficulty is that Alexander has implicitly assumed that the mines of iron ore (that’s how you make steel) are either unowned, or are owned by one of the two operations in the loop. There’s […]

Murphy vs. Vox Day on Free Trade

I don’t regret anything I said in this debate, but I don’t think we had time to really tackle some of Vox’s more fundamental worries. I can understand why a Vox Day fan would not have changed his mind after listening to this. Anyway, I know you guys are always gentle with me in the […]

Bob and Tom Talk Brexit

I really liked this episode of Contra Krugman. We give some good learnin’, and I deliver one of the most brutal zingers to Tom in recent memory. (And don’t stop it near the end when you think we’re just doing wrap-up boilerplate; we have some good jokes about the cruise.)

Matthew Henry on Exodus 1

From Matthew Henry’s Full commentary, on Exodus chapter 1. We were covering this tonight during my Bible study session, and I thought the analysis was very insightful. Sometimes it’s easier to see the obvious (and evil) motives of political rulers, when it’s ancient history. (Note that because the excerpt is so big, I won’t change […]