Bob Murphy

Author Archive

“100 Year Flood Event”

Gene’s post on media reporting of the flooding is typical: Gene makes a confident claim, rob chimes in to meekly disagree, Gene bites rob’s head off, and we all end up wiser. First and probably most important: The “100 year flood event” stuff is defined for a specific region. So over the country as a […]

The Fun Stuff on Liberty Classroom

I was checking the Student Dashboard for my History of Economic Thought classes on Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom, and came across a fun question prompted by my lecture on utility and welfare theory. Just to show you the romping good time, I’ll reproduce the question and answer below. Sign up today and join the fun! […]

Contra Krugman on Hurricane Harvey

In episode 102 we talk about climate change and Houston zoning. Even though Krugman himself didn’t bring it up, Tom and I review the case against the case against (sic) “price gouging.” In fact, I liked our exchange so much that I clipped it into a stand-alone YouTube segment, which you can share with all […]

“Pauly are you OK?”

Unfortunately these guys missed the deadline (which was mostly our fault because we should’ve given better guidance), but this was a very creative submission to our Contra Cruise contest.

Jesus, the Magnificent Leader of Men

(I am picking the title here as a reference to this.) I believe I’ve mentioned this episode before, but for some reason I thought of it again over the weekend and decided to repeat it. Consider this famous passage that occurred after the Last Supper: 30 And when they had sung a hymn, they went out […]

Murphy on Dave Smith’s “Part of the Problem”

This was a very enjoyable interview. Here’s the link to the “recent interviews” page; let me know if you can figure out how to link directly to my interview. We start out talking about standard Austrian economics stuff, but then we turn to the current political scene. I think this one stood out for me […]

A Very Interesting Public Opinion Poll

I think I first saw this linked at SlateStarCodex, so HT2 him, but this recent NPR / PBS News Hour / Marist survey of 1,125 adults from across the nation has some interesting results. First, on the question of what to do with Confederate statues, among African Americans 44% said they should “remain as a […]

If Nobody Gets My Analogies, Whose Fault Is It?

This post is really only directed at those of you who are faithful readers of Scott Sumner. If you don’t follow him, obviously you can feel free to chime in, but I don’t expect you to get the point here. Anyway, Scott recently criticized David Glasner’s definition of “currency manipulation” because it relied on the […]