Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Australia’s Carbon Tax: Lessons for the United States

That’s the title of my blog post summarizing the key points from Dr. Alex Robson’s new study (commissioned by IER) on Australia’s experience with a carbon tax. I don’t want to reduce your incentive to follow the link, so I won’t give any quotes here. There are some purdy graphs and everything, so it’s easy […]

Another Bang-Up Prediction From Krugman, On Employment and the Sequester

UPDATE below. Russ Roberts reminded me of Krugman’s discussion of the sequester back in February: But the legacy of [the Bowles/Simpson deficit commission] lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history. Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into […]

More Reflections on Ronald Coase

Since the transaction costs are so low, why not send you to everything I’ve seen so far: ==> David Gordon talks about Rothbard’s relation to Coase. ==> Robert Higgs gives his recollections. ==> Here’s David R. Henderson. ==> And finally, here’s Steve Landsburg. For my own thoughts, I think Coase’s famous article “On Social Cost” […]

Potpourri

==> Pete Boettke has a nice post on Ronald Coase. BTW, Pete alludes to an episode where William Baumol “got confused” on a basic economic principle. Does anyone have the details? ==> Jonathan Catalan digs up an interesting quotation from Keynes about mathematical economics. ==> This investment firm (I have no relationship with them, at […]

More on Mathematical Economic Modeling

Alex Tabarrok heaps praise upon “Quantitative Economics,” a new online text. Here is part of its description: This website contains a sequence of lectures on economic modeling, focusing on the use of programming and computers for both problem solving and building intuition. The primary programming language used in the lecture series is Python, a general […]

There Is Only One Body of Economic Law: Mises Has Spoken

I just typed in this block quotation from page 68 (Scholar’s Edition) of Human Action: The domain of historical understanding is exclusively the elucidation of those problems which cannot be entirely elucidated by the nonhistorical sciences. [The historian’s understanding] must never contradict the theories developed by the nonhistorical sciences. [Historical understanding] can never do anything […]

Yet More Sumner Sleight-of-Hand

Here’s a good one. Recently John Quiggin updated a post in response to objections from Market Monetarists, because he had said (initially) that nominal interest rates were a good indicator of the looseness or tightness of monetary policy. The Market Monetarists said that the standard view was that real interest rates were a better indicator, […]

Potpourri

Some various YouTube links for you: ==> FEE president Larry Reed’s “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy.” This is a talk that he’s been giving for years (I believe). ==> Louis CK versus Jay Leno. I was actually surprised by how well Leno stood up against the man who is, in my opinion, the world’s […]