Bob Murphy

Author Archive

An Interesting Measure of Prices

I am trying to get some historical statistics to deal with the claims that the Great Depression saw unprecedented action by central banks. Along the way, Daniel Kuehn pointed me to this intriguing chart of the NBER’s “Index of the General Price Level for the United States”: The constituents of the graph (and their weights) […]

Different Kinds of CPI Bias

I am happy anytime GMU professors argue with each other, so I liked this recent post from Bryan Caplan: An argument I’ve repeatedly had with Tyler Cowen: Tyler: We’re stagnating! Bryan: No we’re not. You’re ignoring massive CPI bias. We live in an age ofconsumption-biased technological change. Official numbers don’t adequately adjust for quality improvements, […]

It Was Necessary to Punish Moses

In my (almost) nightly Bible reading, I just wrapped up the first five books last night–Genesis through Deuteronomy. The end of Deuteronomy (Chapter 34) is pretty cool: 34 Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord showed him […]

I Really Tried

So Daniel Kuehn didn’t understand what Peter Klein was getting at when Klein wrote this: Both the Austrian and neoclassical approaches to demand begin with an ordinal preference ranking. But the understandings of marginal and total utility are completely different. For Menger, marginal utility applies only to discrete units of a homogenous stock of a […]

Amanda BillyRock Goes to University…Mises University

I’m still trying to get my right audio channel to work, and she apparently has the ability to speed up time itself in her videos:

Does Anyone Deny That There Were Unprecedented Credit Stimulus Policies During Hoover Administration?

Here’s something I want to pin down. In my book on the Great Depression, I quote Lionel Robbins saying (I think in 1934) that central banks around the world had tried unprecedented measures to stimulate a recovery through cheap credit, and that this was a complete reversal of traditional central bank doctrine. Then Daniel Kuehn […]

NFL Referee Lockout and Private Law

This is a message I just sent to an email List, which I thought some of you might enjoy too: Just a thought for those of you who teach and discuss private law with your students: It seems to me that the NFL lock-out is a great opportunity to talk about private legal systems and […]

Potpourri

I’m almost giddy for tonight’s Potpourri. I don’t know if I’m in a good mood and see the creativity and courage out there in the blogosphere, or if my blogging peers are all having a good week. In any event, here goes: ==> Paul Krugman recently wrote that the US was doing pretty good during […]