Dean Baker's Blog, page 17

The Green New Deal Threatens Republicans’ Bread and Butter, it’s Not Just Competition in the Battle of Ideas

Naomi Klein has an interesting piece in the New York Times on the implications of the Texas disaster. I would disagree with some parts, which attack the Texas approach to energy as “free market.” To my view, this is far too generous.

Even Texas’ deregulated energy market is still highly regulated. It is possible to have hugely different outcomes and incentives by structuring the market in slightly different ways. For example, since the supply of electricity to individual homes in inherently a mo...

The Failure of the Media in Responding to the Lying Right

I posted this Twitter thread this morning. It should be self-explanatory, but it is more than a little infuriating to see the media (not just Thomas Edsall) act like they are innocent bystanders in the rise of an anti-democratic right-wing movement that constantly lies to advance its agenda. The media have agency, but have thus far largely sought to pretend to just be observers. As a result, they allow themselves to be played endlessly by liars like Cruz, Hayley, and Trump.

I saw this Thomas Eds...

How Will Our Children Know They Face a Crushing Debt Burden?

That may seem like a silly question. Of course they will know because there are a number of well-funded policy shops that will be spewing out endless papers and columns telling them that they are facing a crushing debt burden. And, because these policy shops are well-funded and well-connected we can be sure that major media outlets, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio, will give their complaints plenty of space.

But let’s imagine a world where our children weren’t...

Being Wrong in Elite Jobs Doesn’t Have Any Consequences

I just read Nicholas Kristof’s column about his childhood friend Mike Stepp. The piece is actually very moving.

Mr. Stepp grew up next door to Kristof. As he explains in the column, he grew up with an abusive father. Their family didn’t value education, so neither Mike or his brother ever finished high school. While previous generations of workers (white male workers) could work in a factory job without a high school degree, and still enjoy a middle class standard of living, this was no longer a...

More on the Summers v. Biden Spending Debate

I already weighed in on Larry Summers’ complaint that the Biden rescue package may overstimulate the economy. As I said, I thought that while he could be right, the risks of going too small were so much greater than the risks of going too big, that it was worth going forward with the Biden package.

One of the points I made in that post was that excessive demand could be siphoned off in the form of a larger trade deficit, thereby limiting the extent to which it creates inflationary pressures in t...

Wealth Inequality: Should We Care?

I have been dismissive of many of the folks, mostly progressives, who highlight wealth inequality as a measure of overall inequality. As most of us know, the richest people in the country have gotten a lot richer since the start of the pandemic. (Of course, the story isn’t quite as dramatic if we use February of 2020, before the hit from the pandemic, as the base of comparison.) As much as I am not a fan of rich people, this doesn’t especially trouble me.

I have never considered wealth a very go...

Intellectual Property, Inequality, and the New Cold War with China

My diatribe in the Nation — the risk of a new Cold War gives us yet another good reason not to be fans of intellectual property.

The post Intellectual Property, Inequality, and the New Cold War with China appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Excessive Stimulus and Other Things Larry Summers Worries About

It seems that Larry Summers is worried that the stimulus proposed by President Biden is too large. I will say at the onset that he could be right. However, at the most fundamental level, we have to ask what the relative risks are of too much relative to too little.

If we actually are pushing the economy too hard, the argument would be that we would see serious inflationary pressures, which could result in the sort of wage-price spiral we saw in the seventies. As someone who lived through the sev...

Should People Who Want to Save the World from the Pandemic Be Demanding We Pay China to Produce Billions of Vaccine Doses?

I have written repeatedly on how we should have been looking for a collective solution to the pandemic, where countries open-source their research and allow anyone with manufacturing capacity to produce any treatment, test, or vaccine. (We pay upfront, like with Moderna, for those wondering why anyone would do the work.) Anyhow, we obviously did not go that route under Donald Trump.

Along with many others, I have argued that we should still go this route, sharing all our technology freely, as ha...

Getting Lazy in Discussing Winning in the Stock Market

Neil Irwin had an interesting piece reporting on returns to investors who just held stock index funds over long periods of time. The point of the piece is that people who just held an index, rather than trying to speculate on individual stocks, have seen very healthy returns over the last three decades.

While the basic point is well-taken (most people will lose money by trading, both because they tend not to make the right calls on average and because of the fees associated with trading), there ...