Dean Baker's Blog, page 438

Flexibility for Employers Means Less Flexibility for Workers

Steven Greenhouse has a great piece in the NYT reporting on how employers are gaining increasing control over their workers' hours as a way to minimize costs. The obvious point, which seems to be lost on proponents of workplace flexibility, is that allowing employers to be flexible on their time demands means that workers cannot make plans in their lives. This requires them to be able to make child care and other arrangements on short notice. This is likely a very important factor in the qual...

Higher Household Debt Primarily Means Fewer Foreclosures

The NYT badly misinterpreted data suggesting that household debt may soon be rising again. The NYT noted the fact that households may be taking on debt again on net and argued that this may presage an uptick in the economy. In fact, it suggest nothing of the sort.

At any point in time tens of millions of households are taking on new debt by buying homes, taking out student loans, borrowing against a credit or card or taking out other loans. At the same time, tens of millions of families are r...

The Holy Grail of Energy Independence

NPR's Planet Money did a nice piece deflating the nonsense on energy independence. Their crew took the long trip all the way to distant Canada, a country that is energy independent. And, thanks to the fact that they have courageous politicians who are willing to kick environmentalists in the teeth, the free people of Canada only have to pay $4.00 a gallon for gas.

As those of us who took intro economics have tried to explain to the reporters covering the campaign, being energy independent do...

Washington Post Runs Another Front Page Editorial on the Budget

Regular Washington Post readers know that the paper has long since abandoned the separation of news and opinion when it comes to promoting its views on Social Security, Medicare and the budget deficit. It again displayed its disdain for normal journalistic integrity with a front page piece trumpeting a study from National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) that warned of the dire consequences from the "fiscal cliff," the Post's sensationalist term for the scheduled ending of tax cuts and sequ...

NYT Gets It Right on Debt Fixers

The NYT deserves credit for pointing out the personal interest of a group of corporate CEOs in the outcome of negotiations over the budget. An article on the Campaign to Fix the Debt reminded readers that:

"several members of the group, which includes highly paid chief executives of financial and industrial corporations who will stand to pay more if President Obama succeeds in his effort to raise taxes on the wealthy ..."

By contrast, the Post ran an article on the same group last week that n...

Robert Samuelson Takes on NYT Editorial Board: Government Does Not Create Jobs!

Robert Samuelson was sufficiently outraged by a NYT editorial claiming that the government creates jobs that for the first time in his 35 years as a columnist he felt the need to attack a newspaper editorial. Samuelson called the NYT view "the flat earth theory of job creation" in his column's headline. Since on its face it might be a bit hard to understand -- there are lots of people who do work for the government and get paychecks -- let's look more closely at what Samuelson has to say on t...

Will Protectionist Policies Maintain Inequality Throughout the Decade?

Adam Davidson's NYT magazine piece featured the views of a number of economists as to what the U.S. economy will look like at the time of the next presidential election in 2016. Two of the experts seem to be describing a world in which the United States has become increasingly protectionist:

"by 2016, Frieden and Bremmer noted [Jeffrey Frieden, a professor at Harvard and Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group], the U.S. will be adjusting to an economy in which inequality is a structural...

Germany Has Outperformed the U.S. Because of Work Sharing

Nicholas Kristoff uses his column to take a shot at Mitt Romney's economic policies. While the basic point, that austerity will lead to slower growth and higher unemployment, is correct, placing Germany as a basket case alongside the U.K. is not. While the U.K. has aggressively cut its budget deficit, Germany has not been as ambitious in this respect. (Its deficit had not been as large.)

Germany is primarily feeling the effects of budget cuts in the other euro zone countries, which are largel...

The Protectionists are Worried About Doctor Shortages

Bloomberg had a lengthy article warning of looming doctor shortages in the years ahead. Remarkably the piece never once mentioned the possibility of bringing more foreign doctors in the country.

Doctors in the United States get paid on average close to twice as much as their counterparts in Canada, Germany and other wealthy countries. The gap between the pay of doctors in the United States and in the developing world is considerably larger. As a result, if we eliminated the barriers that made...

Income Inequality and Globalization: The Protectionists Rule!

David Leonhardt tells readers today that income inequality is primarily due to technology and globalization. It is possible to tell the story of technology if you are prepared to jump over a few hoops. (The big problem is that economists confidently told us in the 90s that technology favored people with college degrees. In the last decade it seems to only favor people with advanced degrees. If that sounds like a "make it up as you go along" story, welcome to the state of modern economics.)

Ho...