1. Dean Baker was born on July 13,1958 and is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research with Mark Weisbrot.
15 Facts About Dean Baker
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Dean Baker was born into a Jewish family and grew up in the Lake View neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
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In 1981, Dean Baker graduated from Swarthmore College with a bachelor's degree in history with minors in economics and philosophy.
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Dean Baker was a lecturer at the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1989 and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University from 1989 to 1992.
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In that same year Dean Baker was a senior research fellow at the Preamble Center for Public Policy.
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Dean Baker has consulted with officials from the World Bank and provided testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress and to the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council.
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From 1996 to 2006, Dean Baker was the author of a weekly online commentary on the economic reporting of The New York Times and The Washington Post, the Economic Reporting Review.
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Dean Baker won the Revere Award, along with Steve Keen and Nouriel Roubini, for predicting the crash of the United States housing bubble and the resulting recession, which occurred from 2007 to 2008.
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Dean Baker warned about the coming crisis and the related government policies in multiple articles, op-eds and interviews from 2002 to 2005.
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Dean Baker has been critical of the regulatory framework of the real estate and financial industries, the use of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligation, and US politicians and regulators' performance and conflicts of interest.
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Dean 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.
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Similarly, Dean Baker says that changes in patent and copyright law over the past 50 years have violated their purpose under the Copyright Clause of the Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts".
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Dean Baker concludes that if the US had spent the same amount on research and media with the results being placed in the public domain, everyone would be better off, with the possible exception of the ultra-wealthy.
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Dean Baker writes that so-called free-trade agreements have exempted doctors and other highly paid professionals, not because of any intrinsic difference in what they do, but because they have more political power than organized labor.
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In 1986, Dean 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.