Robert P. Murphy

For other people named Robert Murphy, see Robert Murphy (disambiguation).

Robert P. Murphy

Austrian School
Born	(1976-05-23) May 23, 1976
Nationality	American
Institution	Pacific Research Institute (2007–present) Institute for Energy Research (2007–present) Hillsdale College (2003–2006)–
Field	Financial Economics, Trade, Game theory
Alma mater	New York University (PhD) 2003 Hillsdale College (B.A.) 1998
Influences	Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard

Robert P. "Bob" Murphy (born 23 May 1976) is an Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist.^{[citation needed]}

Education and personal life

Murphy received his Bachelor of Arts in economics at Hillsdale College in 1998 and his Ph.D. in economics at New York University in 2003. His dissertation was titled, Unanticipated Intertemporal Change in Theories of Interest. Murphy has one son and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. He states that he is a Christian and a firm believer in Natural Law.

Career in economics

From 2003 until 2006, Murphy was Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan, U.S. From 2006 until early 2007, he was employed as a research and portfolio analyst with Laffer Associates, an economic and investment consultancy in New York.

Murphy is a senior fellow in business and economic studies at the Pacific Research Institute, and is an adjunct scholar and frequent speaker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes a column for Townhall.com and has also written for LewRockwell.com. He is an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and an economist for the Institute for Energy Research. His work has been cited by Walter Block, with whom Murphy has also published. Murphy is a frequent radio guest. He appeared on "Free Markets With Dr. Mike Beitler" on the Voice America Business network on October 30, 2008, and along with fellow Mises Institute Scholars Walter Block, Mark Thornton, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Paul Gottfried, has been featured as a guest on the talk show, The Political Cesspool.

In 2010, Murphy wrote Lessons for the Young Economist, an introductory textbook which presents Murphy's views to seventh through tenth graders. That same year, unnamed libertarians promised to donate $100,000 to a charity if economist Paul Krugman would debate Murphy on economic policy issues. A promotional website was established for the challenge at www.krugmandebate.com

Moral and political beliefs

Murphy has called the State "a monopoly institution of violence." and has stated that he advocates privatization of the legal system, although he denies that "any 'law' that passes the profit-and-loss test is a good one."

In a 2007 interview, he stated: "Many leftists are cynical, bitter people. They have a natural distrust of success. And since the capitalist system undeniably works – and moreover, it works precisely by harnessing the self-interest of people – then its very essence is offensive to these people."

Also in 2007, Murphy discussed slavery in the antebellum U.S. South:

So in a truly free market – even if it started out with some people classified as the "property" of other people – there would be tremendous incentives for the slaves to buy their freedom from their masters. Don't get me wrong, that would be horribly unfair and they shouldn't have to do that in the first place, but nonetheless widespread slavery wouldn't persist if the rest of the economy were a free market.... Yet that's not what happened historically. Indeed, there were all sorts of government interventions that propped up the "peculiar institution." Just a few examples: (1) mandatory slave patrols, in which the local governments forced non-slave owners to defray the costs of the institution, (2) laws against educating slaves, and (3) laws curtailing manumission, i.e. the practice of freeing one's slaves (often in one's will).... So as these two examples demonstrate, the popular historical accounts of the antebellum South and the 1930s get things exactly backwards. It was government intervention in voluntary, private affairs that propped up slavery and led to the Great Depression.

Bibliography

Books

Robert P. Murphy (left) speaking with Suffolk Law adjunct Robert Roughsedge after an event hosted by the Suffolk Law Federalist Society in 2009.

• Chaos Theory (2002) – A short work composed of two essays on market anarchy; one discussing the production of defense services, and one describing the provision of private criminal and civil justice.
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism (April 2007) – A volume in The Politically Incorrect Guide series published by Regnery Publishing.
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal (April 2009)
• Lessons for the Young Economist (2010)
• How Privatized Banking Really Works – Integrating Austrian Economics with the Infinite Banking Concept (2010) co-written with L. Carlos Lara

Murphy has also designed a home study course in Austrian economics (2005), and has written a study guide for Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy and State (with Power and Market) and Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, both published and distributed by the Mises Institute.

Reviews

In the 14 May 2007 edition of Human Events, reviewer Mac Johnson said of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism that,

it takes some discipline to distill complex concepts down to a convenient and accessible form. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism hits this mark…Topics covered include price theory, unions, CEO pay, the minimum wage, child labor and anti-discrimination laws, banking, the gold standard, environmental regulations, antitrust law, deficit spending, safety laws, bread and circuses, globalization, free trade, and the new investor class…

In a 9 July 2007 review for Barron's Magazine, Gene Epstein said the book:

contains more economic wisdom in its fewer-than-200 pages than the average principles textbook several times its length. In clear and often irreverent prose, Murphy makes a compelling case for the unfettered free market, or what his intellectual antagonists would call "free-market fundamentalism."

Although the review is a generally favorable one, Epstein opines that "[o]ccasionally I wish Murphy weren't so irreverent." Referring to the five-question quiz with which Murphy opens the volume, and the answer key Murphy provides, Epstein says "the uninitiated could have benefited from more pointed explanations. I hope Murphy provides these explanations in a subsequent edition." Later in the same column, Epstein compares Murphy's Guide to Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics, noting that,

I only wish Sowell were as informed about the economics of the Austrian school as author Robert Murphy. While Basic Economics and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism work well as companion volumes, in the few cases where they seem to disagree—as in the discussion of money and business cycles—Murphy's version is the more trustworthy.

Incorrect inflation prediction

In the context of his 2009 piece arguing that that the current economic crisis may compel the US Dollar to be abandoned entirely by the end of the Obama Presidency, (to be replaced by the amero or some other currency "issued by a supranational organization") Murphy urged investors to purchase an "emergency stockpile" of physical gold and silver, and predicted double-digit inflation. Murphy then agreed to a bet with David R. Henderson that there would be a year/year increase in the seasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index of over 10% by 2013. Murphy admitted that he lost the bet, but said that the failure of his prediction did not reflect any problems with the Austrian economic methodology.

University of California, Berkeley Professor of Economics J. Bradford DeLong, whom Murphy previously called "completely obtuse," sharply criticized Murphy's reaction to the bet. Citing data indicating that CPI never reached 3% (well short of the 10% Murphy needed to win the bet), DeLong attacked Murphy for "[refusing] to rethink or modify any of his analytical" positions in spite of (what DeLong perceives to be) overwhelming evidence against them. DeLong also criticizes Murphy's Austrian methodology as "uneconomic" and unscientific dogmatism, and favorably cites Paul Krugman's comment that Austrian economists have "the psychology of a cult."

External links

• Robert Murphy's Blog, Free Advice
• Robert Murphy at Mises.org
  • Literature archive
  • Daily Article archive
  • Faculty Spotlight Interview: Robert Murphy
• Murphy article archives at LRC via Way Back Machine
• Interview discussing Murphy's Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism with Scott Horton
• Book review by Thomas Woods of Murphy's Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism
• In Studio: "Lessons for the Young Economist" interview with Robert P. Murphy, November 2010 (YouTube)