Who am I?

Hello, my name is Verl Humpherys and graduated in May 2016 with a PhD in Economics. I have heard that if you want to get a PhD and want to be guaranteed a job after graduating, get a PhD in Economics. I am currently working for Uber since the hundreds of jobs I have applied to do not even want to interview me. Thank god I got my PhD in Economics or who knows what I'd be doing. I might have kept being promoted up the ladder at my previous job and making decent money by now and who wants that?

So I heard about this platform and thought I had a few things to share. I used to have an Economics blog but with my recent failure to get hired in any type of Economist position either teaching, my preferred choice, or as an private or public sector Economist, I did not feel like an Economist.

What are my views?

I was trained in standard Neoclassical and Keynesian Economics. I think it is important to understand both frameworks. I do disagree with both Economic frameworks in many ways. Though not an Austrian Economist, I think there is much to learn from the Austrian school. Both the Neoclassicals and the Austrians agree on many issues but use different models and arguments to reach their conclusions. In important ways, these schools both contribute to a positive understanding of Microeconomics. There are some glaring issues in the Neoclassical and Keynesian Macroeconomics that I feel are better explained by the Austrian school.

My field of interest, however, is Behavioral Economics, a field that is often ridiculed by Austrian Economists. I almost feel that I would have been better off getting a doctorate in Psychology than Economics given how much human behavior fascinates me.

My dissertation consisted of three papers. Unlike most students, my papers were unrelated though tied by their behavioral aspect. The first paper I started and last one I finished was on Loss Aversion in the local housing market. I looked at the time frame around the 2008 housing market crash when it was relatively easy to find homes that had lost value. This paper came out of a presentation I did for one of my classes.

The second paper for my dissertation was a collaborative work with a Professor and colleague in the education department. My coauthors had conducted a series of experiments using videos to supplement in class lectures and I was brought in to do the statistical analysis. Ultimately, we chose the first experiment to do a write-up on. In this experiment, two different sessions of the same Economics course were assigned either to the whole video group or the segmented video group. The first session got one appropriately 30 minute video while the second session got the same video segmented into approximately three 10 minute videos. The question was "Did segmenting improve student performance?"

The final paper I did was a model of charity. I based my model on the prior works of Peter Warr, Russell Roberts, and James Andreoni. The prior models of charity made one assumption that I felt was not valid, that individual and government contributions to charity were equivalent. Relaxing that one assumption, I showed that they their conclusions do not necessarily hold.

But enough about Economics, where do I stand on other things? I am a libertarian, a Voluntaryist, a Free-Marketeer, an anarcho-capitalist, and whatever else means to support voluntary interactions between peaceful individuals and support of private property. I am also an agnostic atheist, meaning I do not know if there are any gods so I cannot believe in any gods.

What do I want to write about?

I want to share controversial ideas here. I may stray from what other people who also claim the labels of either libertarian or atheist think. I am a strong advocate for free speech because we need to learn to understand where other people are coming from. Too many people mischaracterize those they disagree with and we get shouting matches with nothing but strawman arguments.

Most libertarians do not hate the poor and most atheists do not worship Satan.