Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Old Statistics for Data Geeks and History Buffs

It took me a while to track it down, but here (pdf) is an online version of the US statistical information from colonial times. The link I have given takes you to the federal government’s stats, but you can use the left-hand navigation to get at all of the information. In particular, check out page […]

DeLong Draws a Line in the Sand

Commenting on Fama’s critique of fiscal stimulus, Brad DeLong writes: What is extraordinary is that these mistakes are being rederived today, at the end of the 2000s–without any consciousness of their past or of the refutations of them made by past theory and history. I think it is time to draw a line in the […]

Fama vs. DeLong

Von Pepe has been peppering me to address the skirmishes generated by Eugene Fama’s critique of fiscal stimulus. Fama wrote: There is an identity in macroeconomics. It says that in any given year private investment must equal the sum of private savings, corporate savings (retained earnings), and government savings (the government surplus, which is more […]

Potpourri

* Here is David Henderson’s funny disassembly of Peggy Noonan’s Obagaga. * In bad news for David and others who advance the savings glut hypothesis, Chinese bankers call them gangsters. (HT2 Tim Swanson) * Peter Schiff rips stimulus. * John Whitehead uncovers some apparent math mistakes in the job creation calculations for the Obama-Biden stimulus […]

Romanian Interview on Financial Crisis

Available here, though I think they misquoted me.

Filling the Holes in Krugman’s Analysis

You may be getting sick of Krugman-bashing, and in fact so am I. (My next Mises Daily will be a critique of Robert Lucas.) Yet I couldn’t let this one go: So what I’ve come to realize is that in these last few months Krugman has implemented his own private-sector stimulus plan. He has been […]

Two-Minute Hate on Brad DeLong’s Discussion of Modern vs. Classical Liberalism

UPDATED. Wow, this guy is by far my favorite to read in order to wake up in the morning. I will come back and update this post, but for now just enjoy DeLong’s explanation of why classical liberalism (today we’d call it soft libertarianism) failed. UPDATE: I don’t have too much to say, but I […]

Wenzel vs. Murphy

Over at his blog, Robert Wenzel recently made the “Case for Optimism (Sort of),” in which he predicted that Bernanke’s showers would soon bring apparent growth back to the traditional indicators. Wenzel’s momma didn’t raise no fool; he isn’t saying this will be a good thing, since he shares my concerns about price inflation in […]