Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Bryan Caplan vs. Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel recently gave a qualified endorsement to raising the minimum wage, arguing that in the presence of generous welfare benefits it was a second-best solution (not his terminology). The argument made no sense to me, and I was going to write it up but Bryan Caplan beat me to the punch. My question: Is […]

Heritage Confirms My Intuition on “Social Cost of Carbon” Calcs

I can’t remember mentioning this here at Free Advice so… In a recent IER post I walk through the results when a programmer at the Heritage Foundation’s ran Richard Tol’s FUND model to calculate the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) using a 7% discount rate. A 7% discount rate is one of the required parameters […]

Nick Rowe Confounds New Keynesians Yet Again

Nick Rowe has another zany post. Nick is not personally taking a stand on the minimum wage debate. However, he argues that for those economists who do think employment effects will be minimal (or even positive) from hiking the minimum wage, the theoretical argument they usually give to explain the result would also mean that […]

Further Thoughts on Evolution

A month or two ago Jim Manzi dropped a link in the comments here to his dispute with Jerry Coyne on evolution. Here was Manzi’s original salvo, here’s Coyne’s response, and then Manzi answers again. They key point in all of this is that Manzi was not denying, say, that all existing life forms have […]

Summarizing David R. Henderson’s Point About ObamaCare and Jobs

Some people in the comments were wishing we could boil down David’s excellent analysis into a pithy statement, and in the comments of a later post one guy got the point backwards, so let me repeat here what I said to clarify. The point David made was (in my words) (1) just because workers might […]

Casey Mulligan and John Cochrane Crystallize My Angst on CBO ObamaCare Jobs Estimate

I hadn’t read this WSJ piece on Casey Mulligan until the persistent von Pepe sent me Cochrane’s blog treatment of it. Since I already knew Mulligan’s basic points, I didn’t think I’d get much out of it; after all, the CBO itself cited Mulligan’s research in the footnotes when explaining why it drastically increased its […]

Potpourri

==> Mario Rizzo on libertarianism vs. classical liberalism. ==> James Caton Jr. has some problems with the Hayekian triangle. ==> Tabarrok vs. Cowen on immigration. Winner: Tabarrok. ==> Pamela J. Stubbart explains the difference between living in suburbs and a big city. ==> A good interview with me on hard-core voluntary society stuff. I am […]

“I Did Not Know That. Ed, Did You Know That?”

(I used to do a mean impression of Dana Carvey doing Johnny Carson.) OK, it turns out that people attempting suicide with nail guns–even with multiple shots–is not as unheard-of as some of us thought. Frequent commenter and thorn in my side Ken B. points us to this example of a guy who apparently attempted […]