Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Should Whole Foods Be Using Prison Labor?

I don’t definitively answer that question–I’m an economist after all. But I think you’ll have a better way of thinking about the issue after my latest FEE article. My favorite line: “In an ideal society, the term “prison labor” should not strike us as cruel and exploitative any more than the terms “office labor” or […]

Potpourri

==> If you were bothered by my pontifications on the Ahmed clock case, don’t read Gene Callahan. ==> Richard Ebeling doesn’t view low interest rates as tonic for an ailing economy. ==> ZeroHedge on Mark Spitznagel–we ain’t seen nothin yet. (Sung to the tune of Sinatra’s, “The Worst Is Yet to Come.”) ==> Ben Powell […]

More On Ahmed’s Clock

From a guy who actually knows about electronics (as opposed to 90% of the people commenting on this story–including me). I don’t know what happened here. It’s entirely possible that he made the thing innocently enough, and then was coy about it once he realized the situation. I really doubt that he apologized profusely for […]

Free Will vs. Determinism

A lot of people really don’t like the idea (which is certainly in Calvinism but is present in varying degrees in all forms of Christianity) that you have free will and yet God is in control (or “sovereign”). Another way of seeing the tension is that God knew whether you were going to be saved […]

Murphy’s New Book Choice

I’m doing an interview for Free Talk Live and realize that it’s not obvious how to find my new book. In the meantime while I set up a better landing page, here is the link to the synopsis at the Independent Institute. And here’s the link to Amazon.

Scott Sumner, the Dr. Who of Economics Blogging

On EconLog he recently had a post entitled, “Recessions often begin before the thing that caused them occurs.” Now that is a deliberately provocative title, but I understand what he means and in principle I could agree with him (though not in the particulars of his post). However, today at his blog Scott writes: “I […]

Economists Are So Clever, They Can Make Good Climate News Bad

My latest at IER. My conclusion: To repeat, these researchers at Harvard and other elite institutions are very smart, and they haven’t made a mathematical mistake in their models. But the public should pause and ask if these sophisticated maneuvers match the more populist rhetoric they’ve heard on the issue. When even good news—in the […]