Derek Thompson
Derek Thompson is a staff editor at Atlantic Business, where he writes about economics, business and technology. Derek has also written for BusinessWeek and Slate.
About Thompson
Derek Thompson is a blogger at TheAtlantic.com and staff editor for the Business Channel, where he writes about economic policy, technology, and the media industry. His writing may include trace amounts of romantic comedy allusions. Derek graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University with a triple major in journalism, political science, and legal studies, but he doesn't plan on doing anything with that last bit. He has also written for
Slate,
BusinessWeek and
The Daily Beast. He has appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including CBS News Radio, the BBC, and CNBC. If you, too, understand the world primarily through sports metaphors, you might want to
follow him on Twitter.
Weak opening sales of Google's Nexus One phone spawned a spate of panic stories about whether the vaunted Google Phone had already failed. This was more than a little ridiculous. The Google Nexus One debuted on T-mobile, which has less than half the market share of Verizon or AT&T. Even adjusting for that, Nexus One sales were pretty anemic -- 135,00 units sold in the first 74 days, compared to one million for iPhone and 1.05 million for Motorola's Droid. But……More »
How would the college basketball tournament turn out if each game were decided by graduates' median salaries rather than points? Amazingly, there are people who think about this sort of stuff, and put together elegant graphs to prove it.From PayScale (via Catherine Rampell), here is your Sweet Salary Sixteen:
Duke again. No real surprises there. But one thing to consider is that the PayScale folks are looking at median mid-career salaries. If you……More »
Now that the $18 billion jobs bill is headed to the White House, the next stimulus debate will focus on the $150 billion plan that would extend unemployment insurance past a record 99 weeks. One hundred weeks is an awfully long time to be living on the government's dole. It's also an awfully long time to be living without a job. But it government money helping or hurting the unemployment rate?In this lengthy piece, I tried to give a fair hearing to both sides of……More »
The Senate's $18 billion jobs bill is headed to the president's desk after 68 senators voted this morning to cut payroll taxes on new hires and extend highway and transit programs through 2010. The bill is offset under PAYGO rules by giving the IRS new powers to crack down on offshore tax abuses and by delaying an obscure tax credit.The heart of the bill is a tax break for new hires first proposed by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Orrin Hatch. Here's how the credit works.……More »
There is not much about the US economy today that gives off the whiff of inflation. Unemployment is near 10 percent, and consumer confidence is at a year-low. Banks are holding enormous excess reserves, which holds down the money supply. The Federal Reserve has injected more than a trillion dollars into the economy, but core inflation still declined in January. Producers prices are down today. All evidence suggests that inflation fears are a dream.And yet...The US……More »
Remember the mancession? People started to see it more than a year ago, when male unemployment was racing past 10 percent months before the official rate hit double digits. The difference between male and female unemployment hit an all-time high in 2009. The reasons were fairly straightforward. The overall decline in manufacturing gave men a running start. The housing bubble both created and later destroyed jobs in the residential construction industry, where nine……More »
Americans: smarter than you thought?That's the conclusion from this Zogby poll that asked respondents to guesstimate the percentage of big components of the budget, like Social Security, Defense and foreign aid. Here's the graph, from Reason:
What do we learn here? A couple things:1) Americans are famous for overestimating our international aid. One study found that the average American estimates that a quarter of the budget -- more than Social Security, or……More »
As readers of this blog know, I've really enjoyed wrestling with the conservative opus that is Rep. Paul Ryan's roadmap. I've also the enjoyed the back and forth over Ryan's plan between two writers I greatly admire: the New York Times' conservative columnist Ross Douthat and the The New Republic's Jon Chait. To sum up their positions quickly, Douthat acknowledges that taxes might inch up for the middle class and plummet for the rich. Chait goes further, writing……More »
The United States' debt is not in imminent danger of losing its high triple-A rating. But in a Moody's report on Monday, analysts said the our margin for error has "substantially diminished." In other words ... what exactly? Are are standing at the edge of a precipice overlooking calamity, or is Moody's just putting its hands on its hips and shaking its head like a worldly mom tsking her son on the playground?I wanted to know. So I phoned Brookings' debt expert……More »
Here's something you already knew: journalism is facing an advertising crisis. The reasons are simple. Web readers are disparate and distracted, screen sizes are small, and too few companies believe that pixelated display ads are worth print-paper rates.But what you might not have guessed is there is a way out of the ad-pocalypse. Like all challenges, it begins with a good old fashioned brainstorm. From the State of the Media report today, here are 7 ideas that……More »
What is the state of online advertising? Not good, according to this Pew report:
…More »
Health care reform is heading into what could be its do-or-die week. Democrats expect a vote by this weekend. Republicans are digging in. And op-ed writers are making their closing arguments. Here's the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson taking on costs. Samuelson and I agree on the basics of reform: you can't bring down costs dramatically unless you change the fundamentals of our health providers and move away from a fee-for-service system. On every else, we don't……More »
A major "State of the News Media" report is out today from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. I'll be writing up this report throughout the day, but first I wanted to correct a common misconception that is getting new attention from this survey: "nobody will pay for online news."First, it's strange that Americans think they don't pay for online news. We do. We pay through our Internet bill. About two-thirds of Americans have Internet at……More »
The recession is making us sick, and fat, and hungry, and ugly. But what is it doing to our pop music?It's making the lyrics more thoughtful (via Ryan Avent):…More »
This week the New Yorker's financial columnist James Surowiecki explained how money managers at hedge funds and private equity firms sneak around the tax code by treating most of their income as long-term capital gains, which is taxed at 15 percent, instead of earned income, which is taxed at a much higher rate. What he doesn't mention is that a new Republican tax reform plan from Paul Ryan would make those capital gains -- which account for between 20 and 50% of……More »
Republican budget wonk Paul Ryan clearly believes in big ideas. His "roadmap" for America received harsh criticism in the press this week, but the plan is such an enormous grab bag of ideas it would be a shame to dismiss them off-hand. So here's my attempt to dig into his tax plan. It is truly nothing short of revolutionary and transformative -- and probably impossible. Let's start with the big numbers. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center found that Ryan's plan came……More »
The Congressional Budget Office released its analysis for the latest health care reform bill the Senate passed in December. This is essentially the plan that Democrats hope to pass into law with a few procedural touch-ups through reconciliation. So what's the final score? Over 10 years, the bill shaves $118 billion off the deficit. Big news, right?No. At this stage, the CBO's analysis has the distinct quality of being both very important and completely redundant.……More »
When the economy collapses, the federal government runs a deficit. This is basic economic stuff. Americans have less money so tax revenue goes down. The government sends more money out to Americans to keep demand alive, and deficits go up. On the other hand, our 50 states do not have the opportunity to run deficits during recessions, because they are constitutionally required to balance their budgets. So states are slashing spending and raising taxes during a……More »
"Rise in Washington unemployment rate seen as a good sign." No, that's not an article in The Onion. It's not from a memo circulating among Republican strategists, or from bankers trying to securitize unemployment benefits. That's a real headline today in the Washington Post.To explain why they might not be crazy, let's remember what the unemployment rate is. It's the number of people out of work divided by the labor force, which is everybody who counts as either……More »
Health care reform has hit a new snag. It's not the excise tax, or the individual mandate. It's student loan reform.Huh? What does student loan reform have to do with extending health care coverage or bending the cost curve? Nothing at all! But Democrats are hoping to pass a measure that would eliminate private student lenders in the same reconciliation "side car" where health care reform could pass through the House and Senate. Seven Senate Democrats -- Sens.……More »
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