Dean Baker
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People," "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive," "The United States Since 1980," "Social Security: The Phony Crisis" (with Mark Weisbrot), and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.
Articles by this author
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Views Friday, May 31, 2013 The United States Already Has Cuddly Capitalism (The Wrong Kind) Thomas Edsall devoted his blogpost yesterday to a paper by Daron Acemoglu claiming that the United States can't follow a path like Sweden and have "cuddly capitalism." By this Acemoglu is referring to a welfare state that protects most people from the risks in a mar Read more |
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Views Tuesday, May 07, 2013 Budget Austerity Proved a Joke, But the US and Europe Won't Change Course It appears that the Reinhart-Rogoff battles over their faulty data about government debt have flamed out. Read more |
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Views Monday, May 06, 2013 The Secret of the Weak Recovery: We Had a F***ing Housing Bubble The problem with economics is not that it's too complicated; the problem is that it's too damn simple. This problem is amply demonstrated by all the heroic efforts made by economists to explain the weakness of the current recovery. Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 30, 2013 Political Corruption and the “Free Trade” Racket In polite circles in the United States’ support for free trade is a bit like proper bathing habits. It is taken for granted. Only the hopelessly crude and unwashed would not support free trade. Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 18, 2013 Did a Spreadsheet Error Cost You Your Job? Did an Excel error cost you your job? This is what people around the world should be asking after researchers at the University of Massachusetts uncovered a serious calculation mistake. The mistake was in an enormously influential paper by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, two prominent economists, which purports to show that high levels of government debt lead to slow economic growth. Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 30, 2013 Profit Share Hits Post-War High and the Post Doesn't Notice The revised GDP data for the fourth quarter released yesterday showed the profit share of corporate income hitting 25.6 percent. This is the highest since it stood at 25.8 percent in 1951. However if we look at the after-tax share of 19.2 percent, we would have to go back to 20.8 percent share in 1930 to find a higher number, excepting of course the 19.3 percent number hit last year. Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 23, 2013 Neither the NYT nor Washington Post Has Heard About Unemployment It's apparently hard to find out about the state of the U.S. economy in the nation's capital. Read more |
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Views Sunday, March 17, 2013 Capitalism, Steven Pearlstein, and Morality The Washington Post had a major column by Steve Pearlstein on the front page of its Outlook section headlined, "Is Capitalism Moral?" The piece notes the sharp upward redistribution of income over the last three decades and asks whether we should just being willing to accept market outcomes. Read more |
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Views Wednesday, March 13, 2013 What Ryan's Budget Really Says: 'I Love Rich People' Ezra Klein looked at Paul Ryan's latest budget and told readers : Read more |
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Views Saturday, March 09, 2013 Don't Be Fooled: 7.7% Is Likely a Short-Lived Low in the US Unemployment Rate More than five years into the downturn, it doesn't take much to get people excited about the state of the economy. The Labor Department's February employment report showing the economy generated a better than expected 236,000 jobs and the unemployment rate had fallen 0.2 percentage points to 7.7% was sufficient to get the optimists' blood flowing. Read more |