Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Awkward: CBO More Than Doubles Estimate of Negative Employment Effect of “ObamaCare”

[UPDATE below.] At Mises Canada I explain the CBO’s new report that has people guffawing. Note: Please be careful in how you cite their analysis; it’s not really accurate to say, “CBO says ObamaCare will destroy 2 million jobs!” (Don’t get me wrong, it may very well do just that, but my point is, that’s […]

A School for Keynesians Who Can’t Read Good

…should be established. Yes I am now starting to think there is a “Krugman Derangement Syndrome,” because people seem to have an amazing inability to parse objections thrown his way. Today’s case in point: Noah Smith, but first I have to give some context: Ed Prescott (a Nobel laureate) recently gave a quote to a […]

My EconLib Article on the Minimum Wage Debate

Learn it, live it, love it. The key graph, with my commentary: In Figure 1 below, for diagrammatic simplicity, I assume that the initial market-clearing wage for low-skilled labor is $7.25 per hour. At this $7.25 wage rate, two million workers have jobs. Then, the federal government imposes a wage floor of $10.10 per hour. […]

Court Intellectuals Hit Back at Whistleblowers

I’ve been traveling and just now read the mid-January piece in The New Republic by Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton. The ostensible purpose of the article is to cast doubt on the motives of Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Julian Assange, but Wilentz’s hatchet job (and yes I use that term quite consciously) […]

The Father’s (Mother’s) Love

If you’re a parent, think of how much you love your kid. Your kid knows it intellectually, but doesn’t really have any idea of how much you do, especially since you set the rules. Does this exercise change your opinion of God?

I Hope Nobody Took Brad DeLong’s Betting Advice

(Note for new readers: If this post seems obscure and petty, you must not have been around when this happened.) Back in February 2009, the new Obama Administration put out an economic outlook that forecast real GDP in 2013 would be 15.6% above the 2008 level. Greg Mankiw was quite skeptical of this forecast, thinking […]