Dean Baker is annoyed with NPR’s economic reporting. Its quality varies, of course, but this kind of stuff is much more the rule than the exception, in my listening experience.
NPR Doesn’t Believe in Markets
NPR had a piece this morning warning of a shortage of agricultural workers in California. It reported that some crops may rot [...]
Mark Thoma, The Debate over Immigration:
From a policymaker’s perspective, what should U.S. policy address, the welfare of poor anywhere in the world which may represent the preferences of constituents, or should U.S. economic policy attempt only to maximize the welfare of U.S. citizens?
Scroll down to the extensive excerpt from Roger Lowenstein’s otherwise paywalled NY [...]
Joseph E Stiglitz:
A few months ago, Evo Morales became Bolivia’s first democratically elected indigenous head of state. Indigenous groups constitute 62% of Bolivia’s population, and those with mixed blood another 30%, but for 500 years Bolivians had been ruled by colonial powers and their descendants. Well into the twentieth century, indigenous groups were effectively [...]
Dean Baker in truthout: Can Progressives Do Arithmetic?:
The reality is that the price tag for most anti-poverty programs is quite small relative to the total federal budget. For example, Head Start accounts for approximately 0.2 percent of the federal budget, or 20 cents of every $100 of spending. Less than 60 cents of every [...]
Dean Baker illustrates the hazard of taking pronouncements about the effects of trade agreements at face value. Oppose a giveaway to ADM, and you must be against free trade and apple pie.
If the Politicians Say It, It Must Be True:
Look, the people structuring the Doha round are politicians. It should not be news that [...]
John Thornhill at FT.com: Economists are from Mars, Europeans from Venus:
A Martian economist visits earth. Not only does its arrival prove — as many suspected — that some economists really do live on other planets, it also provides fresh perspectives on our world.
Earthling economists chatter excitedly to our visitor about the stunning growth [...]
The blogospheric response to the appointment of Henry Paulson to replace John Snow has been generally, if not uniformly, positive. Max Sawicky
begs to disagree:
All this swooning over the new Bush appointee for Treasury Secretary, not least from leading Democrats like Chuck Shumer and Robert Rubin, makes me want to puke. I suppose some of [...]
Gar W. Lipow:
“Mommy, where do carbon offsets come from?”
“Well, you see honey, when a major polluter and a consultant love money very much they express that love together in a very special way. And nine months later the consultant produces an extremely long piece of paper.”
Kevin Drum:
The average 40-year-old guy made $44,000 in 1973, and that was as good as it ever got. Today that number is about $40,000. It’s gone down even though the American economy has nearly doubled on a per-person basis during that time.
So where did all the money go? What happened in [...]
Dean Baker: The New York Times Discovers Sweden:
The Times had an article this morning that reports on Sweden’s success in sustaining healthy rates of economic growth, while also ensuring a high degree of economic security for its workforce. The article is mostly fair, but is misleading on a [...]
Kevin Drum:
FEEDING THE BEAST….What happens if you lower the cost of something? People buy more of it. What if you raise the cost? People buy less of it.
So: what happens if the federal government reduces taxes and runs a deficit — thus lowering the “cost” of government? People will “buy” [...]
Dean Baker, What’s the Problem With Less Crowding?:
It would be reasonable to think that a densely populated island with exorbitant land and housing prices would be happy to alleviate its crowding problem. That’s not the thinking at the Washington Post.
The Post had an article this morning noting the surprising fact that the number of [...]
David R. Howell and John Schmitt suggest [PDF] that they were.
The widely held view, repeatedly parroted in the U.S. media, that French economic performance is poor and that French employment performance is catastrophic, flies in the face of the evidence. And the conventional wisdom that the French students are wholly misguided in their desire to [...]
Dean Baker: Sick Europe and the Italian Elections:
The elections in Italy prompted another round of knowing comments about how Europeans must get over their silly attachment to employment security (e.g. “Europe Stalls on the Road to Economic Change”). None of the comments I saw even considered the possibility that the contractionary policies of the European [...]
Stiglitz in the Guardian: Development in defiance of the Washington consensus:
China is about to adopt its 11th five-year plan, setting the stage for the continuation of probably the most remarkable economic transformation in history, while improving the wellbeing of almost a quarter of the world’s population. Never before has the world seen such sustained [...]
Dean Baker: Immigrants and “Low Wage” Jobs:
One of the great absurdities in the debate over immigration policy is the frequently repeated claim that the U.S. economy is generating more ‘low wage’ jobs than can be filled by the domestic workforce. This line has been endlessly repeated in news stories on the issue.
Quick trip back [...]
Josh Bivens argues that those who favor free trade in goods ought to oppose restrictions on immigration.
I’m a professional worrier about the impact of trade on the American income distribution. The optimal response to my worries is to strike grand bargains that compensate American workers for the harm done to them by globalization. The corporate [...]
From a series in The Nation.
Taming Predatory Capitalism, James K Galbraith:
In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, “attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude…when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life.” After an entire century’s [...]
Robert Reich reviews Fair Trade for All, by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Charlton, in which the authors maintain that the current program of global trade liberalization is not benefiting poorer countries, contrary to the hype associated with NAFTA and various WTO trade rounds. (Stiglitz is quoted more extensively in an earlier post.
Hence, the authors argue, [...]
“Today, liberalization discriminates against developing countries. It needs to discriminate in their favor.”