Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Paul Krugman, the Brian Williams of Economics Bloggers

I explain at Mises CA. The best part of the post is this meme I created:

Science versus Religion?

Gene Callahan points us to a man who is clearly not a scientific thinker, at least according to the criteria deployed by today’s rhetorical guardians of reason and knowledge. According to Wikipedia, this man used the Bible to make predictions about future events. He spent a great deal of time studying the dimensions and other […]

Tom Woods on DUI Checkpoints

Tom’s guest Warren Redlich talks about DUI checkpoints. Show notes here.

Think About This For a Second

We were talking about experiments concerning special relativity, and I said that an atomic clock was super accurate. My son asked what exactly that meant. This question befuddled me, because I realized I couldn’t come up with a non-arbitrary way of defining a “true” second. Wikipedia informs us: The second (symbol: s) is the base […]

Anti-Conspiracy Theorist Article Unwittingly Trolls Itself

The headline of a recent RawStory article declares: Facebook conspiracy theorists fooled by even the most obvious anti-science trolling: study …and features this charming image: Some strong words and a picture, no? Let’s see what this ballyhooed study found. According to the article: A team of Italian and American researchers tested the social media […]

Unemployment Benefits: The Government Gets What It Pays For

My latest article at FEE. An excerpt: Just about everyone agrees that incentives affect behavior, but economists really mean it. That’s because economists take the logic of incentives further than most other people are willing to. Such analysis often reveals that government policies have unintended consequences that seem shocking to the average person. The list […]

Potpourri

==> His resolve weakens: Scott Sumner admits that there is a non-trivial chance that my monetary views are correct. ==> The media are going nuts over the revelation that one of the leading climate change “deniers” failed to disclose his funding from fossil fuel companies, because obviously this should lead us to doubt his […]

The Union of Concerned Scientists Explains Their Problems With “Intelligent Design”

In my previous post, people in the comments invoked the No True Atheist defense, saying that I was wrong to claim that many professional biologists, when addressing the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, made sweeping statements that rule out even alien designers. Well, here is the official statement on ID from the Union of Concerned Scientists. […]