Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Intro Notes on Economic Inequality

In case you are new to this stuff and don’t like all that book-learnin’, some intro thoughts. Some excerpts: First of all, there’s a distinction between income and wealth. The top 1% of income earners aren’t necessarily the same group of people as the wealthiest 1%. For example, imagine a small hedge fund manager in […]

More Piketty Stuff

==> Piketty only regrets not jacking those trend lines up even more, because of the blockbuster March 2014 PowerPoint. ==> Scott Winship clarifies just how ambiguous the data really are, notwithstanding Krugman’s recent “denier” finger-wagging. ==> Speaking of which, in that article Krugman linked to a Kopczuk paper to bolster Krugman’s claims that everybody knows […]

Check Your Hurricane Privilege

A lot of people were having fun with this study: People don’t take hurricanes as seriously if they have a feminine name and the consequences are deadly, finds a new groundbreaking study. Female-named storms have historically killed more because people neither consider them as risky nor take the same precautions, the study published in the […]

Do “Productivity” and Lagging Wage Growth Disprove Marginal Productivity Theory?

In response to my book review of Piketty, where I claimed in my cutesy “Jetsons” example that a slow-down in capital accumulation would reduce the growth in workers’ real incomes, people have been throwing BLS charts in my face. To take an example from today, on Twitter: @libertarianJ @PorphyConob @BobMurphyEcon "more physically productive per hour, […]

Scott Sumner Learns the Truth About Piketty Firsthand

I just love it when I see people first read Piketty and post their reactions (on FB or blogs) to the effect of, “Wait a second… Is he really saying that? Am I missing something?” Scott Sumner has such a post; this is truly the third such post I’ve seen from a college professor in […]

Full Review of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century

Carlos Lara and I put out a monthly financial magazine, the Lara-Murphy Report. In May I had a full-length review of Piketty. The best way I could think to showcase it here, was to do screen shots of the pages. So here ya go:

“These Austrians Are Funny Guys! Just Kill One of Them.”

Recently someone who is trying to get me a speaking job asked for some samples to wow & impress the event organizer. So since I had to dig these up anyway, here are some of the “funny…for an economist” clips I could remember. (Perhaps my all-time funniest, yet scholarly, talk was contrasting Austrian versus mainstream […]

Audio Book Bask

What do they do in audio books that have a lot of tables (with numbers, I don’t mean furniture)? I ask because I know an author who is doing an audio book for his self-published book, and it contains–you guessed it–a lot of tables, and these are fairly important to his argument.