Thread by @Noahpinion

All the usual suspects are jumping all over Lisa Cook's paper from 2014 and pointing out small errors. But Ken Rogoff served on the Fed Board of Governors and I bet you nobody combed over his papers for errors before he was confirmed! And I bet you he made a few.

Econ academia has very little quality control for data errors. When people do comb over papers for mistakes, they generally find them.

newyorker.com/news/john-cass…

Remember that result about abortion and crime that launched the entire multimillion-dollar Freakonomics empire and made Steve Levitt famous?

Some folks found one coding error that killed the whole result.

bostonfed.org/publications/r…

In 2016, two Fed economists tried to reproduce a bunch of empirical econ papers, using the exact SAME data, WITH THE AUTHORS' HELP.

They could only replicate 49% of the papers!!

federalreserve.gov/econresdata/fe…

Quality control in academic economics is nonexistent. There is ZERO incentive for peer reviewers to go looking for errors in papers. And there is no incentive (other than sheer orneriness or ideological opposition) for anyone to check papers carefully after publication!!

Now this is a sad state of affairs indeed. But what it means is that if anyone has a political incentive to go after any particular economist, they can easily do it. Just comb through their papers and you *will* find errors.

Who was the last Fed candidate from academia who got their papers picked over the way Uhlig & co. are picking over Lisa Cook's paper on patents?

I bet you they all had papers with plenty of errors too. And yet no one cared, no one made a peep.

haralduhlig.blogspot.com/2022/02/lisa-c…

This is not to say errors are OK or should be tolerated because "everybody's doin' it". Academic econ is in a parlous state and needs to be fixed (just like other academic fields). There needs to be some form of systematic quality control and error checking.

But to single out Cook, and to claim that she's an underqualified diversity-hire because her papers contain the same kind of errors you'll find in other empirical papers is...well, it ain't fair, to say the least.

Anyway, if you're really interested in seriously assessing the Cook paper that all the righties are complaining about, Andrew Gelman has a good post about it here:

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/05/how…

But if you really care about making sure that only economists who get all the details right get onto the Fed board, A) good fucking luck, and B) you should advocate some SYSTEMATIC standard for checking, instead of joining an ad-hoc mob.

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