Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Mises, 134 Years Young

From my hagiographical piece at the American Thinker: One of Mises’s earliest achievements was to bridge the two fields we now call microeconomics and macroeconomics.Originally, the classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had embraced variants of a labor theory of value in their teachings. Then, during the so-called Marginal Revolution of the 1870s, […]

Should Whole Foods Be Using Prison Labor?

I don’t definitively answer that question–I’m an economist after all. But I think you’ll have a better way of thinking about the issue after my latest FEE article. My favorite line: “In an ideal society, the term “prison labor” should not strike us as cruel and exploitative any more than the terms “office labor” or […]

Murphy’s New Book Choice

I’m doing an interview for Free Talk Live and realize that it’s not obvious how to find my new book. In the meantime while I set up a better landing page, here is the link to the synopsis at the Independent Institute. And here’s the link to Amazon.

Economists Are So Clever, They Can Make Good Climate News Bad

My latest at IER. My conclusion: To repeat, these researchers at Harvard and other elite institutions are very smart, and they haven’t made a mathematical mistake in their models. But the public should pause and ask if these sophisticated maneuvers match the more populist rhetoric they’ve heard on the issue. When even good news—in the […]

Contra Krugman Trailer

The Wealth-Health Connection

Inefficient regulations can obviously make people poorer, but did you know they can kill? There is actually a whole literature on this. I summarize the key points in my latest IER post. An excerpt: By analyzing consumer behavior, economists can come up with rough estimates of the implied “value of a statistical life” (VSL) that […]

3 Stock Market Tips From an Economist

My latest at FEE. (They picked the title mostly for irony, I think.) You guys think you’ve placed me in a neat little anti-EMH box, don’t you? And then BAM I write something like this: Suppose your brother-in-law says: “I’ve got a great stock tip! I found this company, Acme, that makes fireworks. Let’s wait […]

Potpourri

Sorry for the scant blogging, but I’m in the middle of a move to Texas. In six months, when you see the prodigious output of academic journal articles, you will thank me. (Or not.) Anyway: ==> I have a new Cato working paper on carbon taxes. I co-authored it with climate scientists Pat Michaels and […]