Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Shocking Quotes from Piketty

You know how some of you have been saying, “What the heck Murphy, why do you keep talking about this Piketty book? So what if it was #1 on Amazon, and all the progressives are giddy about it? He just wants to raise tax rates right?” Uh, no. Check out my latest Mises Canada post. […]

2014 Night of Clarity — Featuring David Stockman

This is the annual event that Carlos Lara and I put on, in downtown Nashville. Here is the official event page. Other confirmed speakers: Tom Woods, IBC founder Nelson Nash, and FEE’s Larry Reed.

Is God Funny?

Since I’m such a wiseguy, I would like to think this activity is encouraged (if it’s in good fun of course), but it’s not obvious that it is. Here are some of my quick reflections on the question of whether God is funny: ==> If God is funny, His humor is definitely of the deadpan […]

Even More Inventory Scenarios

Tel and I have been going back and forth in the comments… He pointed out that if inventory grows at 2% forever (along with final sales), then GDP growth is a constant 2%. But be careful, what’s going on is that a constant 2% growth in inventories implies a constant 2% growth in the *change* […]

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Inventory Adjustments in GDP Accounting

Whether it’s government debt-burdened grandchildren, marginally productive capital, or inventory adjustments in GDP accounting, I don’t rest until I have resolved the issue to my own satisfaction–even if the rest of the world has moved on by that point. Anyway, drawing on a neat idea from “Transformer” in the comments here, I discuss this issue […]

Potpourri

==> Dan Sanchez talks about inflation and milkshakes. ==> In this older interview with Russ Roberts, Pete Boettke lays out a neat analogy for Austrian vs. neoclassical capital theory: Legos vs. Play-Doh. ==> An interesting analysis of government vs. market failure in leading textbooks. Krugman is the Team Leader. ==> Reconciling Hayek and Keynes. ==> […]

Larry Summers Unwittingly Blows Up Piketty’s Whole Book

…but he still thinks Piketty should get a Nobel Prize. The gory details are at Mises Canada. An excerpt: Piketty wants to scare his readers into believing that the percentage of income each period going to the capitalists will increase over time, meaning that “the workers” will earn a lower portion of total output in, […]

The Absurdity of Conventional GDP Accounting

In two weeks the BEA will announce an update on its estimate of 1q 2014 GDP growth, but I want to point out a problem with the “advance estimate” (of a dismal 0.1%) that they issued at the end of April. Here is how Forbes reported it at the time: The U.S. economy grew in […]