This is season four episode 43 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.

This episode was recorded on May 19th, 2021.

Jordan and Dr. Robert Murphy discuss Austrian economics. They discuss free trade, private property, the business cycle, and more.

This is nothing that they teach in schools and probably necessary for everyone to hear regardless of age.

Dr. Murphy also discusses his books choice and lessons to a young economist, which are super helpful for those looking to grow their knowledge in economics.

Dad's feeling better, by the way.

It was a severe autoimmune flare up and now that he's back on our ridiculous all beef and lamb lion diet, the reaction is dying down.

No idea how to explain it. It defies logic. It seems to work for us though. So he's feeling better.

Thank God. And that's what's important. New podcasts out soon. I hope you enjoy this episode and have an excellent week.

Hello, everyone. I'm pleased to have with me today, Dr. Robert P. Murphy. Dr. Murphy has a PhD in economics from New York University. He's a research fellow with the independent institute and

a senior fellow with the Mises Institute. He's held academic positions at Hillsdale College and Texas Tech University. He is the author of choice, cooperation, enterprise, and human action, which is a modern distillation of Ludwig von Mises, important treat us on the Austrian school of economics.

He's the author of several other economics books for the layperson as well, including lessons for the young economist and the politically incorrect guide to capitalism in addition to his scholarly work.

He hosts the popular podcast, the Bob Murphy show concentrating on economic and political issues. Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Dr. Murphy. How are you doing?

Oh, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Dr. Peterson. My pleasure. A lot of my listeners have mentioned their belief that my work is somehow reminiscent of work done in the Austrian school of economics. And after reading, I didn't really know anything about the Austrian school of economics.

After reading the bulk of choice, cooperation, enterprise, and human action, I understand why there's an emphasis on value, I suppose, a lot of my work is predicated on the idea that it's not my idea, but on the idea that human beings are goal directed actors and that much of our motivation, much of our behavior can be understood in that light, profitably understood in that light, so to speak. And Mises insisted upon the primacy of human action, really as a star.

And really as a starting point, why did you write choice cooperation, enterprise and human action, and, and maybe we'll walk through it. I wanted to talk to you because I wanted to, two hour lesson in Austrian economics, and I suppose I felt that this was the fastest way to do it. And I could share my intellectual endeavor with all of my audience. And so I'm hoping we can manage that today. So let's go to the book.

Okay, sure thing, and I'm happy to do it. Let me just mention before I forget that I have listened to a bunch of your lectures as well. And there was one besides what you mentioned the affinity with value and that connection.

You often talk about how people get feedback from social cues of others, and that helps people regulate their behavior. And that's a very, let's say, Hayekki in perspective, like when I heard that, I thought, oh, that's sort of like how the price system gives producers feedback as to whether they're using resources profitably.

And then the socially advantageous man or so anyway, I did have an economic argument in mind or an economic analogy in mind when I formulated that argument, I would say, you know, it's, it's very difficult for us to compute our way through life.

Because life is so complex and so uncertain and so multifactorial and all the factors continually change. And so in, yeah, in beyond order in my second book in particular, I stressed the role of responsiveness to feedback as a means of opening the individual to the corrective feedback from a distributed computational device, essentially, I mean, each of us are calculating madly

and in an attempt to minimize catastrophe and and pursue some degree of satisfaction and hopefully pleasure.

And we're all doing that independently and cumulatively, that makes for an incredibly complex computational system. It only makes sense to avail yourself of the outputs of that system if you want to orient yourself properly in life.

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