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Dean Baker

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Dean Baker
Born (1958-07-13) July 13, 1958 (age 66)
Academic career
FieldEconomics
macroeconomics
Real estate economics
Urban economics[1]
InstitutionCenter for Economic and Policy Research
Bucknell University
Alma materSwarthmore College (BA)
University of Denver (MA)
University of Michigan (PhD)
Doctoral
advisor		W. H. Locke Anderson[2]
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
WebsiteDeanBaker.net

Dean Baker (born July 13, 1958) is an American macroeconomist and co-founder, with Mark Weisbrot, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. He is credited as being one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–2008 United States housing bubble.[3]

Early life and education

Baker grew up in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago.[4]: 205–209 

In 1981, Baker graduated from Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in history with minors in economics and philosophy. In 1983, he received a master's degree in economics from the University of Denver. In 1988, he received a PhD from the University of Michigan in economics.[2][5]

Career

From 1988 to 1989, Baker was a lecturer at University of Michigan and then, from 1989 to 1992, an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. From 1992 to 1998, Baker was an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. During this time, he published a paper with Mark Weisbrot in a journal of evolutionary economics.[6]

In 1999, Baker co-founded, together with economist Mark Weisbrot, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an independent, nonpartisan think tank, which produces economic research on topics that affect people's lives to contribute to the public debate (social security, healthcare, the national budget), and internationally (global economy, International Monetary Fund, and Latin America policy).[7]

Also in 1999, Baker was a senior research fellow at the Preamble Center for Public Policy.

Baker has consulted with officials from the World Bank and 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 the economic reporting of The New York Times and The Washington Post.[8] The Economic Reporting Review was published from 1996 to 2006. From 2006, 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.

2007–2008 United States housing bubble

Baker won the Revere Award,[failed verification] along with Steve Keen and Nouriel Roubini, for predicting the crash of the United States housing bubble and the resulting recession, which occurred from 2007 to 2008.[unreliable source?][9] He warned about the coming crisis and the related government policies in multiple articles, op-eds and interviews from 2002 to 2005.[10] Basing his outlook on house-price data-sets produced by the U.S. government, Baker asserted that there was a bubble in the US housing market in August 2002,[11] well before its peak,[12] and predicted that the collapse of this bubble would lead to recession. His prediction for when the recession would start was off by only one quarter.[13][14][15][16][17]

Regarding the housing bubble, Baker was critical of chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.[18][19][20]

He has been critical of the regulatory framework of the real estate and financial industries, the use of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligation, and the performance and conflict of interest of U.S. politicians and regulators.[21]

Baker opposed the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street banks on the basis that the only people who stood to lose from their collapse were their shareholders and high-income CEOs. Regarding any hypothetical, negative effects of not extending the bailout, he explained, "We know how to keep the financial system operating even as banks go into bankruptcy and receivership,"[22] citing U.S. government action taken during the S&L crisis of the 1980s.[23] He has ridiculed the U.S. 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."[24]

Personal life

As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Baker participated in and was arrested at two sit-ins protesting Representative Carl Pursell's votes for military aid to the Contras. In 1986, Baker defeated Donald Grimes in the Democratic primary and ran unsuccessfully against Carl Pursell to represent Michigan's second Congressional district; his candidacy opposed aid to the Contras.[25][26][27]

Baker is married to economist Helene Jorgensen. They live in Washington, DC.[28]

Bibliography

Selected articles

  • Baker, Dean; Weisbrot, Mark (December 1994). "The Logic of Contested Exchange". Journal of Economic Issues. 28 (4): 1091–1114. doi:10.1080/00213624.1994.11505613. JSTOR 4226888.Closed access icon
  • Baker, Dean; Hassett, Kevin (12 May 2012). "The Human Disaster of Unemployment". The New York Times.

Books

References

  1. ^ "IDEAS/RePEc: Dean Baker". Research Papers in Economics (RePEc).
  2. ^ a b Baker, Dean (1988). The Logic of Neo-Classical Consumption Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. OCLC 68299542.
  3. ^ Wachter, Paul (January 2010). "Bubble Buster: Dean Baker '80 [sic] saw it coming. But if anything, his gloomy forecasts now look conservative". Swarthmore College Bulletin.
  4. ^ Bain, Ken (2012). What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-06664-9. OCLC 821823403.
  5. ^ "Curriculum Vitae 2014: Dean Baker" (PDF). United States House of Representatives. 2014.
  6. ^ Baker, Dean; Weisbrot, Mark (December 1994). "The Logic of Contested Exchange". Journal of Economic Issues. 28 (4): 1091–1114. doi:10.1080/00213624.1994.11505613. JSTOR 4226888.Closed access icon
  7. ^ K.S., Jomo; Weisbrot, Mark; James, Deborah (15 April 2011). "The Scorecard on Development, 1960-2010: Closing the Gap?" (Video). Center for Economic and Policy Research.
  8. ^ Dean Baker, CEPR, 9 June 2003, Reflections on Economic Reporting: Seven Years of the Economic Reporting Review
  9. ^ [unreliable source?] https://rwer.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/keen-roubini-and-baker-win-revere-award-for-economics-2/
  10. ^ " Wall Street Economists: A Research Project on Economic Predictions". Archived from the original on 2013-09-01. Retrieved 2013-07-21.
  11. ^ Baker, Dean (August 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.
  12. ^ Reinhart, Carmen M.; Rogoff, Kenneth S. (2009). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. p. 160 (see table 10.8). ISBN 978-0-691-14216-6.
  13. ^ Robert Manne (May 2009). "The Rudd Essay & the Global Financial Crisis". The Monthly (45).
  14. ^ 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. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 6, 2015. Retrieved June 16, 2012.
  15. ^ David Smiley (October 8, 2009). "The Economy in Palliative Care". Progress Magazine.
  16. ^ Baker, Dean (2006). Recession Looms for the U.S. Economy in 2007 (PDF). CEPR. Retrieved 14 June 2012.
  17. ^ Isidore, Chris (1 December 2008). "It's official: Recession since Dec. '07". CNNMoney.com. Retrieved 14 June 2012.
  18. ^ Dean Baker (28 October 2013). "Alan Greenspan owes America an apology". theguardian.com. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  19. ^ Gwiazda, Nick (31 October 2013). "Financial Crisis: The Guardian's Dean Baker Is Wrong – Alan Greenspan Owes Nobody An Apology". ibtimes.com. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  20. ^ Baker, Dean (31 October 2013). "Yes, Alan Greenspan Owes Us a Really Big Apology". Beat the Press. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  21. ^ Dean Baker, The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis, Real-World Economic Review, Issue no. 46, 20 March 2008
  22. ^ Beat The Press, March 9, 2008
  23. ^ William Seidman, Who Led Cleanup of S&L Crisis, Dies, Bloomberg, May 13, 2009
  24. ^ Huffington Post, September 30, 2008
  25. ^ Earle, Rob (22 October 1986). "Baker, Pursell spar in face-to-face debate". The Michigan Daily. Vol. XCVII, no. 35. pp. 1, 5.
  26. ^ Cockburn, Alexander (25 October 1986). "Beat the Devil: Dean Baker for Congress". The Nation. 245 (13): 399.
  27. ^ "Opinion. August 2 primaries: Vote for progressive candidates". The Michigan Daily. Vol. XCVIII, no. 11S. 29 July 1988. p. 4.
  28. ^ Hong, Peter Y. (17 August 2009). "Some saw the housing bubble and sold; trick now is spotting the bottom". Los Angeles Times.

Further reading

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