Dean Baker's Blog, page 44

Is the $738 Billion Military Budget Bigger Than a Breadbox?

The NYT and Washington Post gave us more of their fraternity ritual budget reporting in talking about the new $738 billion military budget agreed to by Congress and Donald Trump. This is known as fraternity ritual reporting because everyone knows that the number $738 billion is completely meaningless to the overwhelming majority of NYT and Post readers. Nonetheless, reporters put it down knowing that it conveys no information, because that is the ritual.

If the papers were actually interested...

Dear Beat the Press Readers

Dawn Niederhauser, CEPR’s Development Department here. It’s the time of year when I highjack Dean’s blog to ask that you consider making a year-end donation to CEPR. As you may have heard, it’s CEPR’s 20th Anniversary this year. Yep, Dean has been calling out bad economic reporting for two decades now, and while he’s definitely made an impact over the years, there’s much more work to do.

So please, click here and donate in Dean’s honor today. Help us to help Dean keep those reporters on their...

Lessons from Charles Lane and German TV on Health Care Costs

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane took a story from a German TV show to lecture his readers about health care costs. According to Lane, the show featured a  German civil servant who had a daughter with a rare and fatal spinal condition. Her only hope was a $330,000 operation in a clinic in Colorado. Her German insurance company refused to pay for it, forcing the guy to try an on-line fundraiser, which also failed.

No reason to go any further with the TV show, but Lane's takeaway is...

Declining Male Workforce Participation: The Story is Not Simple

NPR had a piece on how the percentage of prime age men (ages 25 to 54) in the workforce remains low, despite the relatively strong labor market. While the basic point is true, there are a couple of important qualifications. First, this is not a new story. The share of men who are employed has been dropping for a half century. The second point is that, contrary to what is implied in the piece, the decline in employment rates has occurred for men at all education levels.

On the first point, if...

Jeff Bezos Owned Washington Post Smears Elizabeth Warren

A very large portion of U.S. workers will earn more than $2 million. That's not in a year, but in a working lifetime. That makes a huge difference.

Apparently that point is too subtle for the people who write headlines for the Washington Post. The headline of an article on Senator Warren's income from consulting fees told readers, "Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show."

As people who read the article would learn, this...

Can You Say "Patent Monopoly?" When It Comes to the Opioid Crisis, the Washington Post Can't

This vocabulary problem is apparent in a lengthy (and interesting) piece on efforts by drug companies to push opiods in large part by denying their addictiveness. These companies would have had far less incentive to lie about the dangers of opiods if they were selling at generic prices from the day they were approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The incentive to mislead clinicians and the public about the safety and effectiveness of drugs is one of the main problems of using patent...

Coal and the Left Behind Regions

The NYT had an article that focused on Buchanan County, Virginia as an example of a left behind area in the United States. The county's economy had centered on coal.

While the discussion implies that its downturn is a recent story, the data presented in the piece shows that most of the decline occurred more than two decades ago. The county had more than 5,000 coal mining jobs in the early 1980s. This had fallen to just over 1,000 by the late 1990s. While there was some uptick in coal jobs...

Spending on Prescription Drugs Rose 4.0 Percent Last Year

The Washington Post had an article telling readers "retail drug prices declined last year for the first time since 1973." While the article refers to a study done by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it is not clear that this decline would have much meaning for anyone. As the piece notes, many people were still paying more for drugs in 2018 than 2017 because they faced higher deductibles and co-pays from insurance.

It is also important to note that this study only looked at the...

Simple Economics that Most Economists Don’t Know

(This piece originally appeared on my Patreon page.)

Economists are continually developing new statistical techniques, at least some of which are useful for analyzing data in ways that allow us to learn new things about the world. While developing these new techniques can often be complicated, there are many simple things about the world that economists tend to overlook.

The most important example here is the housing bubble in the last decade. It didn’t require any complicated statistical...

Trump's New NAFTA Means Longer and Stronger Patent and Copyright Protections

That point was missing from this NYT piece on how Trump's trade deal gives into a number of longstanding Democratic demands on labor issues. While promoting workers' rights in Mexico is a positive part of the new NAFTA, this is likely to have less long-term impact on both the United States and Mexico than rules that further strengthen and lengthen patent and copyright monopolies.

The new deal also limits governments' abilities to regulate companies like Facebook and Google. Since the new...