Bob Murphy

Author Archive

A Defense of Surge Pricing

I’m not defending the company Uber per se, but in my latest FEE article I walk through the logic of surge pricing. An excerpt: The wonderful thing about our smartphone age is that the dynamic pricing isn’t merely limited to a particular night, but can vary even in half-hour intervals. For example, Uber emailed its […]

Piketty Makes Up “Facts” and I’m the Bad Guy

I’m being cheeky in the title, but my irritation is real. Both ideological friends and foes have been chiding me for (in my paper co-authored with Phil Magness) focusing on trivial details, like Piketty getting the dates wrong for tax hikes and minimum wage increases. Big deal, Murphy! Focus on the inequality data. But Phil […]

Phil Magness on the Tom Woods Show Discussing Our Piketty Paper

Tom does a good job of pulling out the news you can use. Here are the show notes for this episode, and here is the link to get the paper. The neat thing about this episode is even I learned something: At the end Tom asks Phil how he got interested in this. Phil answers […]

My Response to Piketty’s Response to My Paper With Magness

At Mises CA. An excerpt: OK that is pretty astounding. I encourage readers who haven’t done so, to click on our paper and just read the short sections on the Hoover/FDR tax rates and the minimum wage discussion. If those were “typos,” then when Bill Clinton said he didn’t have sexual relations with Monica Lewinski, it […]

Austrian Economics and Math

I respond to that blog post I had earlier brought to your attention. An excerpt: I can’t think of a single prominent Austrian who ever said anything remotely like, “I hate math.”…So you can see why Albrecht’s whole premise seems foreign to me, and serves only to reassure outside critics that Austrians are a bunch […]

Salvation by Works vs. Faith

One of the most amazing and/or horrifying things about Protestant Christianity is the doctrine of salvation through faith. This is very counterintuitive; hence the familiar question, “So a serial killer gets into heaven if he accepts Jesus on his deathbed?!” I completely empathize with this incredulity, because I would have recoiled in a similar fashion […]

“But Who Would Build the Roads?”

Tom Woods and I tackle this old chestnut. Show notes here with lots of links.

Explaining the Mysterious Sachs to DeLong and Wren-Lewis

[UPDATE below.] Jeffrey Sachs wrote a post critical of Paul Krugman, who lately has been running victory laps over the Obama recovery without acknowledging that he (Krugman) has spent the last two years warning of the horrible effects of sequestration. As you can imagine, the Keynesian bloggers were none too happy about it. Right now, […]