The NY Times flunks the policy test

When economics reporting at the nation's leading newspaper reads like gossip, we’ve got a problem

Partisans of left and right complain that the mainstream media gets things wrong. I've been known to make that complaint once or twice. But I'm not sure that getting things wrong is as serious a problem in the press right now as not getting things at all.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since reading Peter Baker's New York Times Magazine story about economic policy-making in the Obama administration. It is a subject that I have rather keen interest in.

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Brad DeLong is a professor in the Department of Economics at U.C. Berkeley; chair of its Political Economy major; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and from 1993 to 1995 he worked for the U.S. Treasury as a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy. He has written on, among other topics, the evolution and functioning of the U.S. and other nations' stock markets, the course and determinants of long-run economic growth, the making of economic policy, the changing nature of the American business cycle, and the history of economic thought.