Author Archive

Murphy at Brave New Books

The courage to be written! I forget that some of you may not follow me on social media. (Good for you.) I’ll be doing a book signing at “Brave New Books” in Austin tonight, November 4, starting at 7pm. Then karaoke party in the store. (For real.)

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Reader Survey

There are no tricks here, I genuinely want to know: What do you teeming masses think Tyler, DeLong, and Krugman mean when they all refer to the “positive marginal product of capital” (in reference to possibly negative natural rates of interest)? For example, here’s DeLong, who in turn link to Tyler. I’m going to write […]

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Monetary Policy Views Applied to a Thermostat

If you’re trying to understand why I made this post, all I can say is that Scott Sumner went down this road. You wanna get nuts!? Come on! Let’s get nuts! * * * The curtain rises, showing six nerds in a house, all shivering and breath visibly coming out of their nostrils. BEN: While […]

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Contra Krugman Episode 7

Tom and I respond to Krugman’s pro-ObamaCare article.

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I Was Writing About the Natural Rate of Interest Before It Was Cool

As Free Advice readers know, I have had my differences with Scott Sumner. But in a recent exchange he told me: “I’d encourage you to brush up on the Wicksellian theory of interest rates, it might help you to better understand my argument.” More generally, it seems that all the cool bloggers are talking about […]

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The Danger of Relying on a Single Translation

My Bible study partner and I typically read from at least two different (English) translations when covering a portion of scripture. Often it doesn’t make much difference, but once in a while it does. For example, tonight we noticed that the famous “be fruitful and multiply” command from Genesis 1 is followed by “fill the […]

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Jeff Deist Interviews Me About *The Primal Prescription*

Available here.

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The Two Faces of Scott Sumner

I don’t know if Scott Sumner’s world view contained contradictions all along and I am just recently noticing them, or if he decided to punt on most of his original views and focus on “we need more inflation” to not muddy the waters. In any event, Scott used to lecture people when they thought about […]

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