Mark Weisbrot

Early life and education

Weisbrot was born in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a bachelor's degree in economics. Weisbrot received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Career

In 1999, Weisbrot co-founded, together with economist Dean Baker, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), an independent, nonpartisan think tank, which produces economic research on topics that affect people's lives to contribute to the public debate (social security, healthcare, the national budget), and internationally (global economy, International Monetary Fund, and Latin America policy).

Weisbrot is co-author, with Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1999). In the book, Weisbrot and Baker argue that much of the United States Social Security debate has been based on misconceptions, that privatization would be unlikely to improve the system, and that the system, in fact, performs satisfactorily and does not need substantial changes, needing only minor adjustments to in order to continue to pay all promised benefits for the ensuing 75 years. In reviewing the book, The Economist wrote that “Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot have no trouble at all demonstrating that even on highly conservative assumptions about economic growth, the much-forecast insolvency of the Social Security system by about 2030 is most unlikely to happen then, if indeed ever.”

Weisbrot provided testimony to Congressional hearings in 2002 to a United States House of Representatives committee on the Argentine economic crisis (1999–2002) and in 2004 to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the state of democracy in Venezuela, U.S. efforts to undermine the government, and the media inside the country.

As an economist, Weisbrot has opposed privatization of the United States Social Security system and has been critical of neoliberal globalization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has supported efforts by South American governments to create a Bank of the South, in order to make them more independent of the IMF. Weisbrot's work on Latin American countries including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela has been international in scope, and in 2008 was cited by Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim. His work on Greece’s ongoing debt crisis has influenced the debate over what measures the Greek government should take in negotiating a solution with the European Central Bank, European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund, including with Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and current Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

Weisbrot's latest book is Failed: What the Experts Got Wrong About the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2015). In an interview, Weisbrot described the book as critiquing the bad macroeconomic policies often imposed by European authorities, who are ultimately unaccountable to the citizens of the sovereign states that they represent. These policies, he says, prolonged the economic crises in the aftermath of the Great Recession in Europe, which had a much higher unemployment rate than in the U.S., and forced unpopular economic policies of more vulnerable European countries. Weisbrot has made these arguments in various contexts over the years, for example on Greece, on Spain, and most recently, in The New York Times on the French presidential election in April 2017. In an otherwise positive review, Weisbrot was criticized for advocating that Greece would have been better off had it had left the eurozone during its economic crisis. Noam Chomsky called Failed "careful and well-documented" and said it "makes a persuasive case that one goal of the [policies imposed by European authorities] has been to dismantle the social democratic policies that were one of Europe’s contributions to civilized life in the post-World War II period but were unwelcome to major centers of traditional power."

Weisbrot writes a column on economic and policy issues that is distributed across the United States by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. He also writes a regular column for The Hill (newspaper). From 2009 to 2014, he wrote a regular column for The Guardian.

Globalization

Weisbrot argues that globalization as promoted by the United States government and multilateral lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank has failed poorer countries, stating that "no nation has ever pulled itself out of poverty under the conditions that Washington imposes on underdeveloped countries."

Weisbrot has been described as the" intellectual architect" behind the Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela which was spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. He criticized the role played by the IMF while taking an active role in developing the bank, describing the Bank of the South as "another Declaration of Independence for South America" and that it was "Latin America casting off Washington's shackles".

In 2011, he co-authored a series of papers assessing the economic growth and social indicators of all countries with data available, finding that growth and indicators lagged in the last two decades of the 20th century, with a rebound occurring in the first decade of the 21st century. He concludes that neoliberal policies were behind the slow economic growth and falling social indicators, and that the rebound was due to improvements in policy, a loss of influence of the IMF, and the positive impact of China on other countries, among others.

Weisbrot has continued to suggest that the founding of other alternative lending and finance institutions that do not include participation by the U.S., such as those being created by the BRICS countries, may have positive implications both for borrowing countries and in terms of weakening the influence of Washington-based institutions like the IMF.

Latin America

In 2008, Francisco Rodríguez, Head of Research of the Human Development Report of the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme, debated with Weisbrot on his views of Hugo Chávez's economic policies.

In 2014, Weisbrot and his colleague Deborah James attended the "Chávez Was Here" organized by the Embassy of Venezuela, Washington, D.C. gathering on the one-year anniversary of the death of Hugo Chávez. While speaking on the panel, he praised the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution while criticizing the Latin American media, the English-language media and the Venezuelan opposition.

A 2016 National Review article describing Venezuela's deterioration following the Bolivarian Revolution, Weisbrot was described as one of the "leftist admirers of Venezuela" and an "ardent cheerleader" of Hugo Chávez's policies.

South of the Border

Weisbrot and Tariq Ali wrote the screenplay for the Oliver Stone's 2009 film, South of the Border, which examined the "pink tide" of elected leftist governments in South America.

Weisbrot disagreed with Larry Rohter, the former South American bureau chief of The New York Times, over his statements on Venezuela, where Rohter claimed that in support of the film South of the Border, Weisbrot, Tariq Ali, and Oliver Stone manipulated data to present a positive image of Hugo Chávez. Weisbrot has contested the claims of inaccuracies, suggesting that they are indicative of sloppy and misleading coverage of Venezuela in the popular press.

Works and publications