Dean Baker's Blog, page 307

Putting Numbers in Context: Give Dana Milbank a Pulitzer Prize

Regular readers of Beat the Press know that I go into the stratosphere when I see a news story or column that uses numbers in the millions, billions, or trillions and doesn't provide any context, like relating it to the total budget if it's a tax or spending item. The reason for my ire is simple: everyone knows that almost no one is going to be able to assign any significance to these Really Big Numbers. Therefore such pieces are providing no information to readers.

On the other hand it is ve...

Impact of Cutting Unemployment Benefits: North Carolina Dreaming (see Addendum)

Last year North Carolina's conservative Republican legislature got tough. It sharply reduced the duration of unemployment benefits and made them much more difficult to collect. The changes took effect at the start of July, 2013. Their story was that unemployment insurance and other benefits discourage workers from seriously looking for jobs. If we take away this crutch of unemployment benefits, then workers will figure out how to find jobs. This both saves the government money and is better f...

Impact of Cutting Unemployment Benefits: North Carolina Dreaming

Last year North Carolina's conservative Republican legislature got tough. It sharply reduced the duration of unemployment benefits and made them much more difficult to collect. The changes took effect at the start of July, 2013. Their story was that unemployment insurance and other benefits discourage workers from seriously looking for jobs. If we take away this crutch of unemployment benefits, then workers will figure out how to find jobs. This both saves the government money and is better f...

GDP and the Public Sector

Lew Daly has an interesting, but unfortunately misdirected, critique of the measurement of the public sector's contribution to GDP. He notes several areas, such as infrastructure and education spending, where the government contributes to our well-being, but which are not directly picked up in GDP as contributions from the government. While the point is true, the piece fundamentally mistakes what GDP is and also grossly understates the government's role in the economy.

First, GDP is a measure...

Wild and Crazy Times at the Low End of the Housing Market

Floyd Norris had an interesting piece on the impact of investor purchased homes on prices at the lower end of the housing market. His takeaway is that investor purchased homes have made housing less affordable for many low and moderate income households.

While this is partly true, by focusing only on the last couple of years the piece misses much of the picture. While investor purchases have pushed prices to unusual levels in many markets, in some cases they essentially put a floor on the mar...

Trends in Part-Time Employment

A Washington Post article on the June employment report yesterday noted the jump in involuntary part-time employment:

"In June, their ranks [the number of people who are working part-time but want full-time jobs] swelled by 275,000 to 7.5 million. In 2007, 4.4 million people fell into this category."

It is important to note the longer term trend here since the month to month movements are highly erratic. The number of people working part-time involuntarily is down by 640,000 from its year ago...

We Don't Need Patent Monopolies to Finance Vaccine Research

It is amazing that a lengthy piece in the NYT discussing the high cost of new vaccines and the efforts of companies to promote them never discussed the possibility of alternatives to patent monopolies as a way to finance the research. Until recent years, most vaccines actually were developed with public funding, so obviously it is possible.

If the research were paid with public funding, then vaccines would be cheap since they would all be generics. And, there would not be a problem with compa...

Global Warming and the Which Way Is Up Problem in Economics

It is painful to read Eduardo Porter's column on the prospects for slowing global warming and China's greenhouse gas emissions. It's not that Porter got anything in particular wrong; he is presenting standard projections that are the basis for international negotiations. Rather it is the framing of the trade-offs that is painful.

Porter poses the question of the extent to which China should be willing to slow its economic growth to curb its greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to rich countri...

Big Drop in Profit Share in First Quarter GDP

Quarterly GDP data are erratic and profit data in particular are subject to large revisions, but hey it's still worth noting a big drop in profit shares reported for the first quarter of 2014. The data released by the Commerce Department last week showed the profit share falling from just over 21 percent of net value added in the corporate sector in the last quarter of 2013 to less than 19 percent in the first quarter of 2014. Here's the picture.

It's too early to make much of this drop in p...

Housing and the Downturn: It's Really Not That Complicated

Neil Irwin has a piece noting housing's importance in the downturn, which gets things half right. First, housing is typically important in economic cycles, as he says, but the picture is quite different than Irwin implies.

In a typical recession housing construction falls because it is very sensitive to interest rates. Most recessions are brought on by the Fed raising interest rates to slow the economy. In these cases the decline in housing is a deliberate outcome of Fed policy, not an accide...