P3 author Dean Baker (Plunder and Blunder, False Profits) appeared on the PBS Newshour last night to talk about the economy.

What’s refreshing about Dean is his focus on America’s working families. What do they care about? Their jobs, of course. But it’s amazing how often the experts on such programs look at the GDP, or corporate profits, or the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, and skip any consideration of how ordinary people are actually living. In fact, we’ve probably all seen discussions in which economists have openly fretted when unemployment numbers go down.

The unexamined assumption, which seems to be shared by many professional economists these days, is that America’s large middle class is the natural consequence of free market activity. Is that because their training is heavy on the quantitative side and light (perhaps very light) on economic, social, and political history?

In the business, we call that a rhetorical question.