Dean Baker

Dean Baker Speaker Biography

Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Dean Baker co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 1999 located in Washington, DC.  Baker’s expertise include topics such as housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and National Public Radio.  He writes a weekly column for the Huffington Post and a monthly column for Fortune magazine. His blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting.  His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the London Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Daily News. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Books

Baker has written several books, his latest being Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. He has also written Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People, co-authored with Jared Bernstein. His other books include  The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive; Taking Economics Seriously (MIT Press) and False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press, 2010) 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. 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.

Early Career

Economist Speaker Dean Baker previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and he was 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.