Bob Murphy

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We Need Your Help in Standing Up to the Mighty Krugman

EDIT: I’m all set, thanks everyone! I would like to buy up to 2 hours of someone’s time to do some research for the next episode of Contra Krugman. The only hitch is that I need your results by 9am Eastern time tomorrow morning (i.e. Wednesday Dec. 20). I’ll PayPal you $20 per hour. Ideally […]

More on Unemployment Duration

Earlier I had posted a graph showing the *mean* duration of unemployment spells, and I used it to buttress my claims that something was screwy with the labor market. But in the comments Kevin Erdmann seemed to be disagreeing with me when he wrote: I think most of this is due to the extreme extended […]

Krugman on Paul Ryan Bask

For newcomers, on this blog a “bask” is a blog ask. (I don’t beg so I don’t do blegs.) In this Vox interview, Krugman says: “Believe it or not, Paul Ryan’s original proposal was a sensible proposal, which had backing from Democratic-leaning economists as well. If it were actually on the table, I probably would […]

An Argument About Corporate Consistency

Inspired by this Sumner post, I recently tweeted: Someone chimed in to say I was an idiot, and that he could obviously reconcile those two propositions. So I came back and said (paraphrasing), “OK, so if the government keeps cycling back and forth, first raising the corporate tax rate 5 percentages points then cutting it […]

The Superlative Jesus, Part 2

In last Sunday’s post I quoted this challenge: “Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a […]

Here Comes the Sun

I was looking up “winter solstice” just to make sure I was thinking about the term right, and I came across this cool diagram. Although we all know (if vaguely) that the tilt of the Earth explains the seasons and the length of the day (though I think these are subtly different effects), for some […]

Potpourri

==> Here’s the white paper on “Intercoin.” One of the people associated with the project explained to me that he is a fan of both the Austrian and MMT schools. I think the idea is to decentralize cryptocurrency transactions, so that all of the exchanges taking place within local communities can be confined to their […]

Graphs to Accompany Bob’s Commentary During Contra Krugman Episode 117

[EDITed the section about construction employment.] For this episode, we covered this blog post by Krugman, in which he says that the unemployment rate has now fallen down to pre-crisis levels, and so–duh–the “demand siders” were right, while the “structuralists” were wrong. The reason so many people were unemployed in 2009 and 2010 is that […]