Mark Weisbrot
The Guardian Unlimited, 30 de marzo, 2013
En Inglés

Dean Baker
Truthout, April 1, 2013

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera English, April 1, 2013

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, March 30, 2013En Español

Numerology is usually held in low regard in intellectual circles. Unfortunately it is front and center in the debate over national economic policy.

Many economists and political leaders tell the public that we have to keep the DEBT to GDP ratio (capitalized to show reverence) below some magical level. Greg Mankiw professes his adherence to the faith in the NYT on Sunday. The reason that either a specific number or a strict focus on debt to GDP ratios is viewed as silly by people who are not numerologists is that the DEBT to GDP ratio is a completely arbitrary number that tells us almost nothing about the financial health of the government or the country.

First, the debt to GDP ratio is not even telling us anything about the burden of the debt on the government's finances. While the current debt to GDP ratio is relatively high, the ratio of interest payments to GDP is near a post-war low at 1 percent of GDP. (It's roughly 0.5 percent of GDP if we net out the money refunded to the Treasury by the Federal Reserve Board.) By contrast, the interest to GDP ratio was six times as large in the early 90s, at 3.0 percent of GDP.

If we revere debt to GDP ratios, we will have the opportunity to buy back large amounts of long-term debt at steep discounts if interest rates rise later in the decade, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office and others. This exercise would be pointless, since it leaves the interest burden unchanged, but it should make the numerologists who dominate economic policy debates happy. (This debt buyback story is discussed here.)  

Imagine getting paid to write things on economics that don't make sense for the New York Times? That job may not exist if Thomas Friedman didn't invent it. Hence the headline of his Sunday column, "Need a Job? Invent It." 

As Friedman tells readers, you need to create your own job because:

"there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever."

One part of this story is just wrong and the other part is at best misleading.

The wrong part is about jobs being made obsolete "faster than ever." The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) actually measures the rate at which jobs are becoming obsolete, it's called "productivity growth." Over the last five years productivity growth in the non-farm business sector has averaged 1.6 percent annually. That's probably somewhat depressed as a result of the downturn, but even if we go back to 2002 we still only get up to 1.8 percent annually. That's well below the 2.8 percent annual rate from 1947 to 1973.

Bertha Oliva is the General Coordinator of COFADEH, the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared and Detained in Honduras. Bertha’s husband was "disappeared" in 1981, a period when death squads were active in Honduras. She founded COFADEH together with o

In both her story on disability insurance and a Wonkblog interview, reporter Chana Joffe-Walt implies that lots of people are receiving Supplemental Security who don’t deserve the help, and that large numbers of families with children have simply been shi

The Very Serious People in Washington have been running around arguing that the country should be very worried about the aging of the population. The story is that we face an enormous crisis because the ratio of workers to retirees is projected to fall from 2.8 to 1 in 2013 to just 2.0 to 1 over the next two decades. This declining ratio is supposed to mean that our children will face an enormous burden in supporting a rapidly growing population of retirees.

While this projection produces much hand wringing and head nodding among the Very Serious People (VSP), fans of arithmetic know that it provides little basis for concern. The reason for the lack of concern is often given by the VSPs themselves. When pushing the scare story they often throw in the tidbit that the ratio of workers to retirees used to be 5 to 1 back in the 1960s.

Of course the country is far richer on average today than it was in the 1960s even though we have much lower ratio of workers to retirees. The secret is productivity growth. Output per worker hour is more than twice as much in 2013 as it was in the 1960s. As a result, we can both have a larger share of output diverted to supporting retirees and have higher living standards for both workers and retirees.

The same story holds going forward. In 20 years average output per worker is conservatively estimated to be more than 40 percent higher than it is today. This means that even if workers were to see an increase in their payroll tax of 2 or 3 percentage points (almost certainly more than would actually be the case – we can also raise the cap on taxable wages) they would still have much higher after-tax wages in 2033 than they do today.

Earlier this week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures in favor of the 567 families that have been under constant threat of eviction in the Grace Village camp. Given the “imminent” threat to those in the camp, the IACHR urged the Government of Haiti:

1. To adopt the necessary measures to avoid the excessive use of force and of violence in any eviction.  In particular, to guarantee that the public authorities' actions as well as those of private parties pose no risk to the life and personal integrity of the camp residents;

2. To implement effective security measures, in particular, to ensure that there is an adequate patrol around and inside the camp and to install police stations close to the camp. To this effect, the IACHR asks the Government to provide special protection to women and children;

3. To ensure that the residents have access to the potable water required for basic needs;

4. To consult with the beneficiaries and their representatives regarding the measures that need to be taken.  In particular, ensure that the camp residents' committee as well as grassroots women's groups can fully participate in the planning and execution of the measures implemented for the benefit of residents, including measures focused on the prevention of sexual violence and other forms of violence in the camp; and

5. To inform [the public] regarding the adopted measures so as to investigate the events that justifies the adoption of precautionary measures

As we have written previously, the residents of Grace Village have faced significant and on-going harassment, which has included government complicity at both the local and national level. The alleged owner of the land is Pastor Joel Jeune, the founder of a Florida based 501(c)(3) organization, Grace International Inc. As the request for precautionary measures points out, the pastor’s close “ties to the mayor’s office and the local police force him to enlist the help of Haitian police to carry out illegal evictions. With his private security forces and the Haitian police, Pastor Joel Jeune has orchestrated and participated in violent, forced evictions of displaced families living inside Grace Village.”

As my colleague Dean Baker has noted, a controversial This American Life piece on disability insurance “got some of the basics wrong” and “failed to recognize the actual importance of the economic collapse.”  Yet, in a statement to the press, Ira Glass sa

In a new Nieman Reports article, Dan Froomkin argues that the media pay insufficient attention to poverty. Discussing Froomkin’s piece, Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor of the New York Times, notes: “observers like Mr. Froomkin praise the quality of T