Dean Baker

Dean Baker (born July 13, 1958) is an American macroeconomist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, with Mark Weisbrot. He has been a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
Since 1996 Baker has been the author of a weekly online commentary on economic reporting. The Economic Reporting Review was published from 1996 to 2006; subsequently 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.

Baker graduated from Swarthmore College (B.A., 1981), the University of Denver (M.A., 1983), and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 1988). Baker wrote his thesis on consumption theory. He argues that analyzing consumption requires categorizing objects, which cannot be done using only physical characteristics. The words for objects must be used, such as chair. These words imply socially understood uses, which define the object: a chair is used to sit on. Individuals have preferences over these uses of objects. That is at odds with consumption theory, which makes no assumptions about how individuals derive utility from objects. Baker also argues that objects' use values change with their social context, rejecting consumption theory's claim that consumption is private, and not influenced by society.

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 Pursell to represent Michigan's second Congressional district; his candidacy opposed aid to the Contras.

After graduate school, Baker was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He published a paper with Mark Weisbrot in a journal of evolutionary economics. He and Weisbrot founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999, He has consulted with officials from the World Bank; he 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 Washington Post. From 2006, he continued his commentary on the blog Beat The Press in which he critiques economic reporting in the leading US broadsheets, NPR, and other mainstream news sources.

Dean Baker predicted the crash of the United States housing bubble, which occurred in 2007–08. He warned about the coming crisis and the related government policies in several media interviews from 2002 to 2005. Basing his outlook on house-price data-sets produced by the US government, Baker asserted that there was a bubble in the US housing market in August 2002, well before its peak, and predicted that the collapse of this bubble would lead to recession. His prediction for when this recession would hit was out by only one quarter.

Regarding the housing bubble, Baker has been critical of chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan.

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 US politicians and regulators.

Baker opposed the US 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," citing US government action taken during the S&L crisis of the 1980s. He has ridiculed the US 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."