Bob Murphy

Author Archive

So This Is What It Feels Like to Be a Square

All summer I have been dying to take my 8-year-old to a movie, but a bunch of obvious ones (Superman, Wolverine, etc.) were PG-13. So I was happy that I was able to take him to see Percy Jackson today–a series of which I knew nothing. I was a little concerned when I looked up […]

DeLong Sees Nothing In the Investment Data That Would Slow Capacity Growth

[UPDATE below.] Brad DeLong has this habit where he makes it look as if he’s walked through several different strands of evidence, and they all come down squarely on the position he agreed with at the start of his investigation–even though some of the evidence obviously cuts the other way. It’s like we’re arguing over […]

Potpourri

==> The other day I had a deadline, so naturally I ended up watching the SNL auditions of both Phil Hartman and John Belushi. The former impressed me much more than the latter. Hartman had a very unique style. ==> If you took away my interest in karaoke, and forced me to teach at a […]

See the Knots the Federal Government Is In, Regarding “Social Cost of Carbon”

This is pretty funny. In my Senate testimony one of the key points I made was that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines state that federal agencies are supposed to do cost/benefit calculations using both a 3% and a 7% discount rate. Yet the Obama Administration Working Group only used 3% and 5% […]

Interesting Narrative on the Heliocentric Theory vs. the Church

In a recent offhand remark, George Selgin criticized certain Austrians’ thinking on banking as being akin to “theologians bungling their cosmology” six centuries ago. I asked if George actually had particular theologians in mind. George sent me this link, which does indeed have quotes from heavy-hitting theologians (including Martin Luther and John Calvin) that are […]

Potpourri

==> Totally off-topic, but I would change my gender if I could be Christina Bianco. ==> Nick Rowe strikes back on the definition of “inflation.” I know this isn’t the point Nick was making–and I don’t even disagree necessarily with anything in his post–but let me say this: If we let Scott Sumner get away […]

Two Sumner Posts That I Thoroughly Enjoyed

In this post, Scott hits something that I have been pointing out myself: So let’s review the past year: 1. Keynesians warned us that it would be a huge mistake to adopt fiscal austerity in America. It would cut growth sharply. Mark Sadowski has the details. 2. The “Laffer wing” of the Keynesian movement predicts […]

Even Krugman Doesn’t Believe Krugman on Hayek

In this post, I walked through just how absurd it was when Paul Krugman recently said “…back in the 30s nobody except Hayek would have considered his views a serious rival to those of Keynes…” What’s funny is that Krugman himself blew up that silly claim two days later, without even realizing it, in a […]