Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. His blog, “Beat the Press,” provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and the New York Daily News.

Dean has written several books including Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People (with Jared Bernstein, Center for Economic and Policy Research 2013), The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2011), Taking Economics Seriously (MIT Press 2010) which thinks through what we might gain if we took the ideological blinders off of basic economic principles; and False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press 2010) about what caused — and how to fix — the current economic crisis. In 2009, he wrote Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press), which chronicled the growth and collapse of the stock and housing bubbles and explained how policy blunders and greed led to the catastrophic — but completely predictable — market meltdowns. He also wrote a chapter (“From Financial Crisis to Opportunity”) in Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era (Progressive Ideas Network 2009). His previous books include The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press 2007); The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research 2006), and Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press 1999). His book Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index (editor, M.E. Sharpe 1997) was a winner of a Choice Book Award as one of the outstanding academic books of the year.

Among his numerous articles are “The Benefits of a Financial Transactions Tax,” Tax Notes Vol. 121, No. 4 (2008); “Are Protective Labor Market Institutions at the Root of Unemployment? A Critical Review of the Evidence,” (with David R. Howell, Andrew Glyn, and John Schmitt), Capitalism and Society Vol. 2, No. 1 (2007); “Asset Returns and Economic Growth,” (with Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2005); “Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (2004); “Medicare Choice Plus: The Solution to the Long-Term Deficit Problem,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (2004); The Benefits of Full Employment (also with Jared Bernstein), Economic Policy Institute (2004); “Professional Protectionists: The Gains From Free Trade in Highly Paid Professional Services,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (2003); and “The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble,” Center for Economic and Policy Research (2002).

Dean previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD’s Trade Union Advisory Council. He was the author of the weekly online commentary on economic reporting, the Economic Reporting Review (ERR), from 1996–2006.

By this expert

Inequality As Policy: Selective Trade Protectionism Favors Higher Earners

Article | Oct 27, 2016

Offshoring manufacturing may have hurt many working people in America, but professionals and intellectual property have been robustly protected

Featuring this expert

Yahoo Money features Cai & Baker’s INET working paper

News Mar 5, 2021

“Making matters worse, the Black unemployment rate might be much higher, according to a new analysis by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The unemployment rate is calculated using data from the Current Population Survey. But that survey has a much lower response rate from Blacks than from white Americans, leading to more misclassifications in the official unemployment rate. For Blacks, the response rate is 72%, while the response rate is 90% for whites. Factoring that in, the unemployment rate for Black workers could be at least 2.6 percentage points higher than the monthly rate by the BLS, leaving it at 12.5% in February, the analysis found. For whites, the increase is much smaller at 0.7 percentage point. “The Current Population Survey has been missing a larger share of the population over time, particularly among Blacks,” said Baker, who is also an author of the analysis. “You have to ask what’s the situation for the people they’re not talking to.” — Denitsa Tsekova, Yahoo Money

Arjun Jayadev has an article in the NY Times on the crisis of access to affordable medicines and the need to suspend intellectual property rights

News Dec 7, 2020

“the vaccines developed by these companies were developed thanks wholly or partly to taxpayer money. Those vaccines essentially belong to the people — and yet the people are about to pay for them again, and with little prospect of getting as many as they need fast enough. … mounting pressure from poor countries at the W.T.O. should give the governments of rich countries leverage to negotiate with their pharmaceutical companies for cheaper drugs and vaccines worldwide. Leaning on those companies is the right thing to do in the face of a global pandemic; it is also the best way for the governments of rich countries to take care of their own populations, which in some cases experience more severe drug shortages than do people in far less affluent places.” — Achal Prabhala, Arjun Jayadev and Dean Baker

Intellectual Property Watch: Patents Without Examination

News Apr 30, 2018

INET Senior Economist Arjun Jayadev and Dean Baker explore the patent system of Brazil, and its implications for developing countries.