Robert Murphy
Economist and Author · Consulting by RPM
Robert P. Murphy is an economist, author, and podcast host known for making Austrian economics, monetary theory, energy policy, and public policy accessible.
View full profileExplain how theories of value, exchange, money, production, and interest developed from pre-classical thought through classical economics and the marginal revolution.
Contrast labor and cost theories of value with subjective marginal utility and identify the pricing problems each approach addresses.
Evaluate arguments concerning specialization, comparative advantage, protectionism, monetary adjustment, Say’s Law, and voluntary exchange.
Compare Menger’s causal analysis, Jevons’s mathematical utility theory, Walras’s general equilibrium, and Marshall’s partial-equilibrium synthesis.
Analyze competing productivity, exploitation, abstinence, and time-preference explanations of capital returns and interest.
Identify how simplifying assumptions, formal models, historical context, and methodological commitments shape economic conclusions and controversies.
This course follows the development of economic thought from ancient and scholastic reflections through classical economics and the marginal revolution. It examines early accounts of exchange, just price, money, interest, and production before tracing debates over specialization, free trade, population, distribution, general gluts, protectionism, and the labor theory of value. Smith, Ricardo, Say, Bastiat, Mill, Marx, and other classical thinkers are considered in context and assessed through both their achievements and unresolved problems. The course then explains how Menger, Jevons, and Walras recast value through marginal utility while developing contrasting causal, mathematical, and general-equilibrium approaches. Wieser’s factor-pricing analysis, Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and interest, and Marshall’s neoclassical synthesis extend the inquiry into production, time, and price formation. Throughout, original arguments and later criticisms illuminate how competing methods and assumptions shaped enduring economic controversies.
Economist and Author · Consulting by RPM
Robert P. Murphy is an economist, author, and podcast host known for making Austrian economics, monetary theory, energy policy, and public policy accessible.
View full profile