Dean Baker

I’m sure it has happened before, but I just can’t remember when. The NYT has a positive story today about how Germany’s export sector is booming, leading to healthy growth and a declining unemployment rate. It’s not a bad piece, although the article still thought it best to report Germany’s official unemployment rate of 9.8 […]

The NYT reports today on a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control that doctors abandon a class of antibiotics used for treating gonorrhea because the bacteria has developed resistance. This is an interesting, but hardly unique story. The article notes that drug resistant strains of tuberculosis have also developed in recent years. The development […]

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech yesterday in which he said that he thought the minimal regulation of hedge funds now in place was just fine. It might have been worth mentioning that his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, thought it was necessary for the Fed to intervene in 1998 when one hedge fund, […]

Hey, it was their idea — I’m not kidding. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson begins his column with a discussion of the presumably humorous suggestion that baby boomers be paid to kill themselves. The column gives the standard baby boomers breaking the bank generational warfare story that appears so frequently in the pages of the […]

Spurred by continuing confusion over the extent to which weak wage growth can be blamed on upward redistribution to profits and high end wage earners, I decided to do a quick accounting exercise to lay out the basic numbers. Using total economy productivity (instead of non-farm business sector), and adjust for the gap between gross […]

The NYT joined the list of shrill proponents of the Bush-Clinton trade agenda with today’s editorial. It starts by telling us that it would be a bad idea to raise the price of steel imported from China because that would make the planes produced by Boeing more expensive: “What would happen to Boeing if the […]

That is the only possible conclusion that a listener to a NPR piece on recent trends in homeownership could reach. The piece discussed the recent rise in homeownership as an unambiguously positive development. Of course, many recent homebuyers are finding that they bought homes at a bubble peak, and that the homes are now worth […]

For the second time in the last couple of months, the NYT ran an article on rising army desertion rates in which it compared the current rate to the Vietnam era desertion rate. Neither article pointed out that in the Vietnam era, the country had a military draft while the current army is comprised of […]

The NYT reports on the fact that Florida, California, and other states are now having to scale back their projections of property tax revenue because of the recent turnaround in housing prices. The article finds several analysts from the “who could have known” school of economics. –Dean Baker