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Dean Baker (born July 13, 1958) is an American macroeconomist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, with Mark Weisbrot. He previously was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Since 1996 Baker has been the author of a weekly online commentary on economic reporting. The Economic Reporting Review was published from 1996 to 2006; subsequently he has continued this commentary on his weblog Beat The Press, which was formerly published at The American Prospect, but is now located at the CEPR website.

Biography

Baker graduated from Swarthmore College (B.A., 1981), the University of Denver (M.A., 1983), and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1988). Baker wrote his thesis on consumption theory. He argues that analyzing consumption requires categorizing objects, which cannot be done using only physical characteristics. The words for objects must be used, e.g., chair. These words imply socially understood uses, which define the object, e.g., a chair is used to sit on. Individuals have preferences over these uses of objects. This is at odds with consumption theory, which makes no assumptions about how individuals derive utility from objects. Baker also argues that objects' use values change with their social context, rejecting consumption theory's claim that consumption is private, and not influenced by society.

As a grad student at the University of Michigan, Baker participated in, and was arrested at, two sit-ins protesting Rep. Carl Pursell's votes for military aid to the Contras. In 1986, Baker defeated Donald Grimes in the Democratic primary and ran unsuccessfully against Pursell to represent Michigan's second Congressional district; his candidacy opposed aid to the Contras.

After graduate school, Baker was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He published a paper with Mark Weisbrot in a journal of evolutionary economics. He and Weisbrot founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999, He has consulted with officials from the World Bank; he has provided testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and to the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council.

From 1996 to 2006 Baker was the author of a weekly online commentary on The New York Times' and The Washington Post's economic reporting. From 2006 he continued this commentary on the weblog Beat The Press, where he critiques economic reporting in the leading broadsheets, NPR and other mainstream news sources.

The Great Recession

Basing his outlook on house-price data-sets produced by the US government, Baker was among the first economists to assert that there was a bubble in the US housing market in August 2002, well before its peak in December 2005, and one of the few economists to predict that the collapse of this bubble must lead to recession, and also correctly predicted this recession would hit in 2007. He has been critical of the regulatory framework of the real estate and financial industries, the use of financial instruments like CDOs, and the performance and conflicting interests of US politicians and regulators.

Baker opposed the US government bailout of Wall Street banks on the basis that the only people who stood to lose from their collapse were their shareholders and well-paid CEOs. Regarding any hypothetical, negative effects of not extending the bailout, he has explained, "We know how to keep the financial system operating even as banks go into bankruptcy and receivership," citing US government action taken during the S&L crisis of the 1980s. He has ridiculed the US elite for favoring it, asking, "How do you make a DC intellectual look less articulate than Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric? That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression."

Bibliography

• The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. 2011. ISBN 978-0-615-53363-6. Note: This book is free.
• Taking Economics Seriously. MIT Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-262-01418-2.
• False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy. PoliPoint Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-982-41712-6.
• Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. PoliPoint Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-981-57699-2.
• The United States Since 1980. Cambridge University Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-67755-4.
• The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research. 2006. ISBN 1-4116-9395-7. Note: This book is free.
• (Coauthor with Jared Bernstein). The Benefits of Full Employment: When Markets Work for People. Economic Policy Institute. 2003. ISBN 978-1-932-06604-3. {{cite book}}: External link in |title= (help)
• (Coauthor with Mark Weisbrot) Social Security: The Phony Crisis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. 1999. ISBN 978-0-226-03544-4. {{cite book}}: External link in |title= (help)
• Getting Prices Right: The Battle Over the Consumer Price Index. New York: M.E. Sharpe. 1997. ISBN 978-0-7656-0221-3. (selected as a 1998 Choice "Outstanding Academic Book")

References

1. Dean Baker at IDEAS
2. Dean Baker at Economic Policy Institute
3. The logic of neo-classical consumption theory, 1988.
4. Alexander Cockburn, "Dean Baker for Congress," The Nation, Oct 25 1986
5. Jonathan Scott, "Dean Baker's war of position," Race & Class, July 2009
6. Baker, Dean; Weisbrot, Mark (1994). "The logic of contested exchange". Journal of Economic Issues. 28 (4). Association for Evolutionary Economics: 1091–1114. JSTOR 4226888.
7. CEPR, Dean Baker
8. Dean Baker, CEPR, 9 June 2003, Reflections on Economic Reporting: Seven Years of the Economic Reporting Review
9. Baker, Dean (2002). "The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is it Real or Is it Another Bubble?". Center for Economic and Policy Research. Retrieved 2012-06-18. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
10. Reinhart, Carmen M; Rogoff, Kenneth S (2009). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. p. 160 (see table 10.8). ISBN 978-0-691-14216-6.
11. Robert Manne (2009). "The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis". The Monthly (45). {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
12. Dirk J. Bezemer (2009-06-16). "'No One Saw This Coming': Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models" (PDF). MPRA Paper No. 15892. Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Retrieved June 16, 2012.
13. David Smiley (October 8, 2009). "The Economy in Palliative Care". Progress Magazine.
14. Baker, Dean (2006), Recession Looms for the U.S. Economy in 2007 (PDF), CEPR, retrieved 14 June 2012 {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |separator= ignored (help)
15. Isidore, Chris (1 December 2008). "It's official: Recession since Dec. '07". CNNMoney.com. Retrieved 14 June 2012.
16. Dean Baker, The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis, Real-World Economic Review, Issue no. 46, 20 March 2008
17. Beat The Press, March 9, 2008
18. William Seidman, Who Led Cleanup of S&L Crisis, Dies, Bloomberg, May 13, 2009
19. Huffington Post, September 30, 2008

Further reading

• Roberts, Russ (January 9, 2012). "Dean Baker on the Crisis". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.
• Dean Baker presentation on 2008-2009 economic trouble at Bucknell University
• Marketplace Public Radio (Audio): We Demand to See More Transparency, March 9, 2009
• C-SPAN's Book TV (Video): "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy", January 27, 2009
• News Hour with Jim Lehrer (Video): "Massive Job Cuts Renew Calls fro Quick Action on Stimulus", January 26, 2009
• NPR's Fresh Air (Audio): "The Key to Economic Stimulus?", January 13, 2009
• Bill Moyers Journal (Video), August 8, 2008
• Dean Baker argues that the debate over the economy should not be over whether to regulate, but how in the Boston Review
• Video (and audio) of debates & discussions involving Baker on Bloggingheads.tv
• Dean Baker: Banks Could Be Big Winners of President Obama’s Foreclosure Prevention Program - video by Democracy Now!

External links

• Official site
• Center for Economic and Policy Research
• Op-eds and columns
• "Beat The Press" blog
• Predictions
• Dean Baker at IMDb

Template:Persondata

• Swarthmore College alumni
• University of Denver alumni
• University of Michigan alumni
• Bucknell University faculty
• 1958 births
• Living people
• American economists
• American economics writers