Marginal Revolution: Profile of Kevin Murphy

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Profile of Kevin Murphy

Many people call him the smartest economist in America:

“Kevin is far and away the smartest guy in the field,” says Freakonomics author Steven Levitt...“Often, the better you get to know these guys, the less ingenious they seem. It’s just the opposite with Kevin. Not only is he widely regarded as the smartest economist on earth, but he can also fix your refrigerator.”

The article also explains why every one of Murphy's 60-plus papers is co-authored. The pointer is from Craig Newmark, and also from Steve Levitt.

Addendum: Try also Levitt and Dubner on the economics of weather.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 4, 2006 at 07:07 PM in Economics | Permalink

Comments

Why is he wasting his time on Economics?

Posted by: dearieme at Nov 5, 2006 9:48:42 AM

I am very, very taken with Murphy's arguments about the value of medical research -- but no many should be judge in his own case. What do the wizards of MR think about this?

Posted by: Bill Gardner at Nov 5, 2006 3:24:44 PM

I was out a few months ago with a group that included a Chicago econ grad student. Over diiner she happened to mention that Murphy and Becker teach a seminar together and that everyone's there to hear what Murphy has to say. Becker's a piece of furniture.

Posted by: Auto at Nov 5, 2006 6:02:39 PM

He sounds like a good guy.

Here's an obvious question, though: Since everybody refers to Murphy as supersmart -- i.e., he has an extremely high IQ -- why doesn't Murphy's work on human capital refer directly to IQ, rather than always to proxies for it such as educational level?

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2006 6:38:56 PM

To be specific, Murphy has the exact same educational credentials as the other top 1,000 or so economists in the country. Yet he is more productive than 99% of them, which his colleagues attribute to his being "the smartest economist in America." So, economists informally acknowledge the real world importance of intelligence, yet Becker and Murphy, like almost all other economists, typically only include proxies for intelligence in their studies of human capital, rather than direct measures (i.e., IQ scores).

And, it's not as if IQ data is unavailable. The U.S. military spends a fortune tracking how real world performance, both in military and civilian life, correlates with performance on the military's IQ entrance test, the AFQT. To get it, you just have to politely ask onoe of the military's psychometricians, the way Herrnstein and Murray did back around 1990.

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 5, 2006 6:51:57 PM

I like the original quote better.

"An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better... It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are, and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible." - Mark Kac, on Richard Feynman

Posted by: garysixpack at Nov 6, 2006 1:49:59 AM

"Since everybody refers to Murphy as supersmart -- i.e., he has an extremely high IQ"

Non sequitur. Certainly at least over 140.

As for the quote on Feynman, I've never understood what exactly that was talking about him doing. Solutions to problems in beautiful systems are much easier.

Posted by: bhauth at Nov 6, 2006 2:14:43 AM

bhauth,

"Orthogonal" means perpendicular to, metaphorically
coming from a completely different angle.

Now that people are quoting my old friend, Mark Kac, I
guess I must weigh in, although one does not like to
criticize when people are gushing praise. This is not
to say anything bad about Kevin Murphy, who is almost
certainly the smartest economist at Chicago or UCLA.

But there is a bigger universe of economists out there.
He is older and slower now, but I doubt that Murphy
is smarter than Kenneth Arrow, and I am certain he
is not smarter than John von Neumann was, although
technically the latter was a mathematician who just
happened to do economics and physics and such on the side.

Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Nov 6, 2006 8:01:55 AM

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