 Our guest this week is none other than our old friend Bob Murphy. Bob is actually in town here in Auburn this week teaching at Mises University helping us out with our new Mises boot camp concept. And he's also got a new book he's promoting called Choice, Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action. And not surprisingly it is based off Mises' Human Action. I've heard it described as being what economics in one lesson was to Bastiat's a law, Bob's new book is to Human Action. So it's about 280 pages. It's a much easier read than Human Action, but it's not a substitute per se. It's actually designed to get readers interested in Mises and reading Human Action perhaps with a clearer eye from having read Bob's book. So we're going to talk to him about that. We're going to talk to him about his fantastic new opportunity at Texas Tech and all things Bob Murphy. So please stay tuned for an interview with one of our favorite guests. Bob Murphy, welcome back to Mises Weekend. Thanks for having me, Jeff. A pleasure. I think it's been maybe a year or so since we last talked to you. And for those who don't know, Bob is here in Auburn this week. You're teaching Mises' You. You're teaching at our Austrian economics boot camp. You've got a brand new book out and then on top of all that, you have the pressure of performing karaoke. It's not really performing, but I think I'm going to be DJing it as well. So let's see, I'm wearing many hats this week. So you are wearing many hats. Since we last spoke, tell us about what's been going on with you and we know that you've got a new opportunity at Texas Tech as well. Sure. So I'm moving to Texas Tech for the fall semester and it will be there for the whole academic year. And yeah, I'm looking forward to working with Ben Powell and all the guys down there. And it's a research position, but I'll be available for if your students want to talk about their thesis or what have you. And I hear they have a human action reading group. So it sounds like my kind of place. Your new book is called Choice, Cooperation, Enterprise and Human Action. And I've heard it described as being what economics in one lesson was, Debastiat's law, this book is to human action. Was that your intention in writing it or is that accurate? Well, that's very a flattering thing that someone must have told you. Yeah, what we are trying to do is the way the project was presented to me is not something that summarizes the essential insights of human action but yet could plausible be assigned to a college undergraduate course where they were econ majors. Because human action is, I think it's one of the most important economics books ever, certainly the 20th century, but it is a bit intimidating for various reasons. And so I tried to boil it down to make it short accessible language and not assume any prior knowledge for the reader. And I think that we've accomplished that somewhat in this book. Well, as you can imagine, this is something we struggle with in teaching econ, right? We're in an era where a lot of people are going to read 900-page books. It's just the reality of our social media-driven consumer consumption society. So is the answer to that, writing 300-page books that are condensed versions or is the answer to that to use this as the gateway drug? I think it's going to do both. So I think that there are going to be some people who are going to read choice who never would have read human action in the first place. And so we're not losing anything in that way. And I think they're going to get across the main essentials of what Mises had to offer. But then, yeah, I think some people... One thing that this book will do, I believe, is even for mainstream economists who wonder what's all this hubbub about Austrian economics? Why do you guys, how come some of you like this Mises guy so much? I think if they give this book a chance, you know, you're going to get drawn into it and there is enough meat there that even anyone from just the responsible person who wants to know more about how does the world work, how does the economy work up to even professional economists who just haven't really read Mises in the original can gain a lot from this. Well, not only with this book, but in your career generally, you've done a lot of writing and speaking for a lay audience. And I think that that's one of the strengths of the Austrian school is that we're not as clickish, we're more willing to teach and approach lay audiences with a message of econ as opposed to academic audiences only. You know, but looking back, do you feel that that was the right choice? You think of Rothbard and Mises who are now much better known than many of their contemporaries who took more traditional academic routes simply because they did reach out and talk to a lay audience. Right, I think it is. It's understandable for people who are if trying to get tenure or something, you know, trained economists at universities. Obviously, they're going to want to publish in peer review journal articles. They have to do that sort of thing. But I do think for one thing, it just in terms of my own career and what I've done, yes, it would have been gratifying to spend more time just working on certain real technical areas and try to get them published in certain journals. I might have thought, I go, wow, that proves how smart I am. But I don't think that would have been the best use of my time that I think, I mean, look at where we are right now. People are still don't believe in free trade. They're wanting to double the minimum wage or more so. I think it's going to have drastic consequences. Certainly, we, as Austrians, we disagree strongly with what central banks around the world did since 2008. So these are all things where the theory in the hands of Mises and Rothbard, we don't need to advance it beyond that. The important thing is trying to take what they did and bring it to the general public. And I have found that you mentioned, you know, talking to a lay audience. Certainly, since the crisis struck, I've been in various capacities going around talking to crowds, people in the financial sector, just, you know, let's say upper middle class people wanting to know, what do I do with my money? That sort of conference or seminar. And the Austrian message clicks with those people. When I go through a diagnosis of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, I might not use that terminology, but I might just explain this is where the housing bubble came from and so on. People say, yeah, I knew something was screwed up. I just didn't know what it was. Thank you. Now I understand it much better. Like it really resonates with the average person who knows the guys on CNBC don't know what they're talking about. But just practically speaking, nobody reads peer-reviewed journals other than a few economists are interested in that particular niche. I mean, I would wager that you, Bob Murphy, are far better known because of your career path than you would be if you were right now a professor at some state university. I mean, that's probably true. And then, of course, the people at the state universities would be real elitist about it and say, yeah, but who cares whether you're Taylor Swift's popular too. So, you know, sorry, what you're saying is certainly true. And like I said, I do think that's the most important use of my time. Are you comparing yourself to Taylor Swift, drawing an analogy between Bob Murphy and Taylor Swift? Well, I think we're just all along the same continuum, yes. There's a continuum. Yeah, I would say there's a continuum. I'm curious, you know, at one point I interviewed Gido Hulsman about his process of writing the Mises biography, an incredible journey for him. I just wonder if writing this book caused you to go back and reread portions of human action. Did it get you a little more in Mises' head by necessity to write this? Oh, yeah. I went through and read the thing cover to cover again. I mean, I read that book, I want to say at least four or five times cover to cover. The previous time was when I did the study guide for the Mises Institute. And incidentally, people keep emailing saying, is this different? Yes, choice is different from that. And so, by all means, by both of them. But it's one thing that really, and this is going to sound silly because people would know this who read Mises, but the importance he placed on calculation, it wasn't just a matter of efficiency. I mean, he was making civilization itself depend on man's ability to apply quantitative cardinal numbers to the affairs of, you know, property relations and you can't do it directly, right? You know, value is subjective. You can't just do it directly. You need money prices. That's the way those two things get linked where you can deploy arithmetic to matters of the economy. You need to have money prices in order for that to work or to even be possible. And that really came through on this reading. And then there were even just some finer points of economic theory about the relationship between rent and interest and so on that, I mean, I knew of that, but I just, reading it this time for whatever reason, it's little passages, little throwaway lines Mises had, where I was like, wow, this guy really was on top of several different areas of just pure theory that I didn't catch upon the first few readings. Well, one thing I like right off the bat is when I look at the index, the table of contents, the way you've chosen to structure the book, to order it, is a lot less daunting than when you start leafing through the table of contents of human action. Right. So because this is 300-some-odd pages, obviously we did have to, we couldn't cover everything. I couldn't paraphrase everything. And there's some stuff in here where I had to do a little digression and explain the context before explaining what Mises' contribution was in that section. So, yeah, we did have to make some tough decisions. And what I did with this is I thought, especially for this time we have now, that I really wanted to get across Mises' understanding of money, banking, capital theory, and then all those things put together, you need to know so he can understand his theory of the business cycle. So that was the, as opposed to what's wrong with minimum wages. I mean, Mises does talk about that, but that's not so important that you can get that from other sources. So that's really what I, my goal was with this is I said, when someone's done with this, I want them to really understand why Austrians are so concerned about what central banks have been doing since 2008. That's what I think why the Austrian school is so important right now and what they offer that even other main free market schools don't. To go back to a point you just made, describe for us the difference between this and the study guide. The study guide that you did for the institute is obviously shorter. So distinguish the two. Okay, so the study guide really just follows the human action almost section by section. So more of a cliff note. Right, so just distills what he's, you know, put it in easier, more accessible language, but basically just looks at a section, what it means to say here, let me paraphrase that and boil it down. Yeah, cliff notes is a way of putting it. And then they had questions and so on, like study questions to make sure you're getting the big points. But there I was not trying to independently teach the same material. I was really just trying to explain. So someone who's reading human action side by side with the study guide can make sure they're getting the big picture and they're not missing something important. Whereas this book choice is a standalone one that it follows human action somewhat closely in terms of the ordering of the material, but it is more saying I'm writing a book from scratch, if you will, that covers a lot of the same material that's in human action. And then the other main differences, choice has a lot of illustrations or examples of things to sort of illustrate what's going on in human action. Like for example, this idea of free banking where Misa says in human action, this is a paraphrase, that the idea of free enterprise never should have been abandoned in the field of banking. And then he just gives some quick lines about if one bank tried to expand more quickly than the others in terms of issuing fiduciary media, the notes would quickly get returned to it by a clearing house process and the bank would be ruined. He doesn't really spell that out. He just assumes the reader is familiar with that literature. So in the study guide, I kind of just paraphrase what Misa said and moved on in choice. I go through like a real drawn out numerical step by step example to make sure the reader can see exactly why if one bank tried to expand more than the others, it would run out of reserves very quickly. And so I think if you hadn't read that elsewhere, you might not have realized just that deep mechanism and how amazing the market is. And what we learn about the purpose of central banking is the exact opposite. In reality, central banking was there to form a cartel and foster credit expansion, not to limit the wildcat free banks that would inflate on their own. And we need the government there to protect us from those crazy inflationist banks. And that's the other way around. Well, let's talk about Misa's achievement in writing a magnum opus of this scope and scale in a language other than his native tongue. He writes his earlier sort of proto version national economy, obviously thinking and writing in German. Whereas here he has his wife, his faithful wife helping him with the typing task, but it must have been an enormous challenge to wrestle with conceptually dense material in a brand new language of sorts for him in middle age. What is interesting though is I don't mean to, when we say it's intimidating whatnot, I don't want to suggest that you don't try to read it. It actually, he's even funny. It's a certain type of humor, but it really is when the style finally clicks with you and you get the way he writes, it is fun to read even certain parts, just his real formal language, but yet you're blown away by his incredible depth of knowledge and you're right. I can't imagine having written the one thing in German and then having to do it again in a different language that I would just say, wow, that was just too much. That would take a decade out of my life, my lifespan probably. It is impressive to see him do that. It is amazing. Not the least of which is because several of the areas where he's summarizing economic theory on that topic, he himself contributed importantly to certain of those areas. The most prime example being monetary theory, where I think it's fair to say Mises united micro and macro and applied the new subjective theory of marginal utility to money, whereas really that hadn't been done before him. So that's just one of the things he summarizes in human action, where he had earlier played a seminal role in that development. The book Choice is available from the Independent Institute. It's available at the Mises Institute website. Bye bye. Sumit is available via amazon.com. Yeah. What's on the horizon? Bob Murphy, we talked about you're heading to Texas Tech and you're going to be living in Texas. How do people find you? What are your websites? What are the ways to get in contact and read and keep up with Bob Murphy? Sure. The safest thing is to go to consultingbyrpm.com. That's my main personal blog where I'll... I have various outlets where I publish stuff regularly, but I always put it there. So if you want to find out where I am, just go to the consultingbyrpm.com. Bob, thanks so much for coming to Auburn this week and spending some time with us. You love you and we will keep in touch and follow your advancement at Texas Tech.