Bob Murphy

Author Archive

Tyler Cowen Comes to His Senses

Cowen has been on fire lately at MR. Maybe he is countercyclical in his musings; when a “free market” Administration is in power, Cowen says all sorts of things that annoy me, but now that a pump-priming Democrat is about to assume power, Cowen is writing all sorts of critiques of Keynesianism. Whatever the reason, […]

Proponents of "Green Jobs" Need to Read Bastiat

At IER we are preparing a critique of some of the leading “green jobs” studies. Perhaps the most important was put out by the Center for American Progress. A colleague sent me this response they gave to a Heritage Foundation / WSJ critique of their study. They don’t even acknowledge that their plan costs anything; […]

Brad DeLong Doesn’t Even Know Who He’s Dealing With

UPDATE below. In this well-reasoned post, Brad DeLong says Mises’ Theory of Money and Credit is “readable in a rhetorical-excess-train-wreck mode, for it is also totally bats— insane.” (BTW, because of my charming innocence, upon my first reading I didn’t even catch the “bats—” adverb. [You want to say batsh*t is a noun, but I’m […]

The Predictive Power of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (in the right hands)

In a previous post, I asked (partially in jest) if I had gone into the wrong profession, because the performance of economists before and during this financial crisis has been so abysmal. It’s not even that we disagree on how to fix things; we can’t even agree on what’s wrong. (For example, Tyler Cowen and […]

Did I Pick the Wrong Profession?

Over at MR, wiseguy meter wrote: I have to say, this is like watching a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. ‘The Economy’ is surely large and complex, but it is surprising (to me, and other laypeople I’m sure) that economists can’t come to a consensus on even the theoretical prescriptions & proscriptions […]

Fractional Reserve Banking Explained

Loren Howe runs a vlog and asked the Mises Institute for help in understanding how modern banking systems create money. I thought his email raised some interesting questions, so (with his permission) I reproduce it here and hopefully provide decent answers. I run an online vlog with around 20,000 viewers who would be very grateful […]

Why No One Takes Economists Seriously

In a recent post, I tried to explain the undeniable fact that many laypeople act as if they are entitled to their views on the economy, in a way they would never dream of doing with regard to, say, quantum physics or heart surgery. A CNBC news story from today sheds light on this phenomenon: […]

Hayek on Meet the Press in 1975

Jeff Tucker (editor of Mises.org) posted this last week, but I just got around to listening to it today. Here is the mp3 of Hayek on Meet the Press in 1975. It’s pretty amazing to hear someone like Hayek being thrust into the media circus, and it’s also interesting how “modern” it all sounds. My […]