Bob Murphy

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I’m going on a long trip so not sure what blogging will be like for a few days… In the meantime: ==> David Glasner has a nice Alchian post. Man, there were some heavy hitters at UCLA back in the day. I used Jack Hirshleifer’s textbook when I taught intermediate micro. It had the cool […]

Sequestration Analysis

Man the CBO makes it tough to figure out what absolute spending levels will be. Their analysis of the December/January budget deal–the one that spared us the horrors of the fiscal cliff–is couched as changes relative to the then-current baseline. So I took that as the August 2012 CBO Outlook, and constructed the following: I […]

New NERA Study on Two Carbon Tax Scenarios

NERA Economic Consulting is out with a very nice study on two carbon tax scenarios. I know this modeling team (well, at least the lead author) and I think they are very nuanced in their analysis; if you scroll through the paper you can see they explain exactly what their charts are saying, etc. This […]

I Am Officially in the Twilight Zone: Callahan and Glasner on Sraffa-Hayek

[UPDATE: I’m slightly editing the “exchange” (which are my words of course) between Hayek and Sraffa to make it closer to their actual words…] It’s a weird situation, I grant you, but I’ve been running around for years saying that the Austrians have never given a good response to Sraffa’s critique of Hayek. (I summarize […]

It’s Monday, So Krugman Thinks Labor Costs Hurt Employment

Commenter “Xan” draws our attention to today’s post from Krugman, in which he writes: A commenter on my last euro post asks a good question: didn’t Germany once have a problem of excessive unit labor costs, which it cured with a protracted squeeze? And in that case, why is it so terrible if Spain is […]

A Christian vs. Skeptic on Heaven and Hell

CHRISTIAN: Praise God! He sent His only Son to die for our sins, so that we could have eternal life. SKEPTIC: That is a repugnant doctrine. Putting aside all the scientific and logical flaws, look at what a tyrant your so-called God is. He is saying that if we don’t worship him, he burns us […]

Mario Rizzo’s Ludwig Lachmann Impression

There’s some other stuff about Israel Kirzner in here you might find interesting, but in yet another contribution, the wry von Pepe points us to 45:00 in this video:

Minimum Wage Analysis: Killing Econ 101 Via the Magic of Econometrics

I tried working my way through the Dube, Lester, and Reich (2010) paper that I think is a good representative of the “latest research” that allegedly overturns the old consensus. Now that I am pretty sure I know what happened, I have to say that if these results are allowed to guide the debate, then […]