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 profileTrace twentieth-century economics from marginalism and socialist calculation through Keynesian, monetarist, growth, game-theoretic, and public-choice frameworks, comparing how rival traditions explain prices, welfare, institutions, policy, and economic change.
Explain how subjective value, ordinal utility, monetary regression, capitalization, and intertemporal exchange reshaped theories of prices, welfare, money, and interest.
Analyze the distinct calculation and knowledge problems raised against socialism and evaluate market-socialist efforts to simulate competitive prices.
Compare Keynesianism, monetarism, rational expectations, and real business cycle theory on unemployment, inflation, expectations, monetary effects, and policy.
Evaluate Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks criteria, externality remedies, Coasean bargaining, models of competition, social-choice constraints, and capital-theory controversies.
Use growth, game-theoretic, public-choice, and public-debt concepts to interpret coordination, long-run change, political incentives, institutional design, and intergenerational burdens.
This course surveys major developments and disputes in twentieth-century economic thought, beginning with the marginal revolution’s implications for money, utility, welfare, and interest. It examines how Mises, Hayek, market socialists, and later theorists debated whether planning can reproduce the knowledge, prices, and calculation generated by markets. Lessons on externalities, property rights, competition, monopoly, capital, and social choice reveal competing standards for evaluating efficiency and institutions. The course then contrasts Keynesian explanations of unemployment and aggregate demand with monetarism, rational expectations, and real business cycle theory. Growth models connect saving, capital accumulation, innovation, and steady states, while game theory clarifies strategic interaction, cooperation, credible threats, and equilibrium. Public choice and government-debt analysis extend economic reasoning to voters, officials, bureaucracies, interest groups, and future generations. Throughout, Robert Murphy reconstructs influential models carefully while highlighting their assumptions, internal logic, and major Austrian and heterodox criticisms.
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