Investigative journalist Christopher Rufo has written up a piece exposing a huge problem over at the Federal Reserve, and that problem’s name is Lisa D. Cook. Cook is considered to be one of the most powerful economists in the world, having taught the subject at both Harvard University and Michigan State University. Rufo also revealed this little problem also formerly served on the Council of Economic Advisers back when Obama was president before she was eventually appointed in 2022 to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which has the power to control the money supply in the U.S., and interest rates.
And while she certainly has a lengthy list of credentials, there is quite an extensive list of questions concerning her academic record floating around that have yet to have firm answers. One thing Rufo notes in his report is that there isn’t a whole lot of work in her publication history for someone who is a tenured professor. What she does have published seems to focus on race activism instead of economics. Further, in order for her confirmation to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors to go through, she needed Vice President Kamala Harris to cast a tie-breaking vote. Her predecessor, Janet Yellen, who now serves as the Treasury secretary was unanimously confirmed, according to Rufo.
Here’s more from Rufo’s report:
The quality of her scholarship has also received criticism. Her most heralded work, 2014’s “Violence and Economic Activity: Evidence from African American Patents, 1870 to 1940,” examined the number of patents by black inventors in the past, concluding that the number plummeted in 1900 because of lynchings and discrimination. Other researchers soon discovered that the reason for the sudden drop in 1900 was that one of the databases Cook relied on stopped collecting data in that year. The true number of black patents, one subsequent study found, might be as much as 70 times greater than Cook’s figure, effectively debunking the study’s premise.
Cook also seems to have consistently inflated her own credentials. In 2022, investigative journalist Christopher Brunet pointed out that, despite billing herself as a macroeconomist, Cook had never published a peer-reviewed macroeconomics article and had misrepresented her publication history in her CV, claiming that she had published an article in the journal American Economic Review. In truth, the article was published in American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, a less prestigious, non-peer-reviewed magazine.
Rufo then discussed how an exclusive investigation conducted by both the Daily Wire and City Journal discovered there were even more facts that cast a looming shadow of doubt over Cook’s authenticity as a legitimate scholar. A series of academic papers written over the course of a decade seems to indicate that Cook copied language from several other scholars while failing to provide proper quotation. She also duplicated her own work and that of coauthors in several academic journals, again without providing proper attribution. These are major violations of Michigan State University’s written academic standards.
Rufo then provided several examples, which he says clearly establishes that Cook has a lengthy history of sloppy scholarship and potentially academic misconduct as well.
In one example, a paper called “The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names,” published in 2021, Cook used the handy-dandy copy-and-paste feature to apparently steal some material from Charles Calomiris and Jonathan Pritchett, word-for-word, and did not bother to use any quotation marks when describing the findings made by the pair, which is required.
Take a look at the original passage:
During this time, New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market. Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated slaves like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806, section 10). Today, the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States.
Now let’s see Cook’s paper, which is verbatim the work of Calomiris and Pritchett, with the only change being made to deletion of the word “slaves” and replacing it with “the enslaved.”
Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated the enslaved like real estate, and slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806 section 10). Today the records of many of these slave sales may be found in the New Orleans Notarial Archives and the New Orleans Conveyance Office. Because of the availability of these records and the size of the market, New Orleans is the best source for data on slave sales within the United States. [ . . . ]
During this time New Orleans was the largest city in the South and the site of its largest slave market.
This behavior is repeated in a paper dated October 2021 called, “Closing the Innovation Gap in Pink and Black,” which was paid for by a whole lot of government subsidies and took Cook several years to rate, and ultimately didn’t do much other than summarize the work of three researchers: Charles Becker, Cecilia Elena Rouse, and Mingyu Chen. Cook copied around 70 words of their work with no quotes.
This appears to be a violation of the standards in Michigan State University’s guidebook, which states that authors must paraphrase or add direct quotations to verbatim passages. “It is your responsibility to make certain that you understand the difference between quoting and paraphrasing, as well as the proper way to cite and delineate quoted material,” the guidebook reads.
Cook also duplicated several passages of her own work, apparently too sloppy or too lazy to attempt to write anything original.
Does the deliberate recycling of old material, including material from coauthors, constitute academic misconduct? It is true that journalists, for example, often adapt previous reporting into a compilation or a book. But the standard in academia is more rigorous. According to the Michigan State University guidebook, republishing identical material across multiple journals, without proper attribution, appears to be a violation of the rule against “self-plagiarism.” The standard is that scholars cannot use copied language “regardless of whether [they] are or are not the author of the source of the copied text or idea.”
What kind of penalty should Cook face for her misconduct? Well, if you or I were to participate in this kind of activity, we’d be fired for sure. What makes Cook any better? In fact, Cook herself, according to Rufo, engaged in pushing for similar kinds of punishment against other individuals who participated in the same kind of conduct.
In 2020, she participated in the attempted defenestration of esteemed University of Chicago economist Harald Uhlig for the crime of publicly opposing the “defund the police” movement. She called for Uhlig’s removal from the classroom, claiming that he had made an insensitive remark about Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university closed its own inquiry after concluding that there was “not a basis” to investigate further.) Uhlig, in a 2022 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, asked the pertinent question: Under the leadership of an ideologue such as Lisa Cook, would the Fed continue to pursue its mandate, or succumb to left-wing activism?
Truth be told, we probably won’t see Cook held accountable for her actions at all. When you are on the side of the left and have the major connections that she has, you are able to get away with a lot of bad behavior. But the people know the truth. Perhaps it’s up to us to hold Cook accountable by pressuring our elected officials to look into what she’s been up to for years now?
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