Recently, the Financial Times revealed that Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, is littered with passages lifted from other sources, including that dubious fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, without the correct acknowledgement such as quotation marks, footnotes and a bibliography. Reeves has, of course, denied plagiarism and her office has defended her by stating that she had made ‘inadvertent mistakes’ that will be ‘rectified in future reprints.’ Oh, so that is okay, then, and we can all move on. But in fact, it is not okay and we must not move on.
Forgive me if I am being callow, but surely the position that Reeves is angling for, and which she probably will acquire at the next election, is one that not only requires vision, but also an indefatigable attention to detail? A person who has the responsibility of managing the economy and resolving its staggering challenges, such as stubbornly high inflation and a consequent cost of living crisis, needs to be one who is not prone to elementary errors. Reeve’s careless prose places a question mark over her competence in this area.
The position of Chancellor of the Exchequer is one that also requires a robust intellect. Take, for instance, Geoffrey Howe. According to a former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Lord Macpherson, Howe’s tenure in office was characterised by ‘intellectual energy and openness to debate’ which is one of the reasons given by Macpherson for asserting that Howe was ‘one of the great Chancellors of the 20th century.’ This is high praise as it comes from a man who worked at the Treasury for thirty years, and saw many Chancellors come and go. Can you imagine Howe using Wikipedia (if it had existed then) and unacknowledged sources to formulate his economic ideas? That is what Reeves has done, and yet we are expected to see her as the saviour of Britain’s economic travails. Really?
There is also the troubling issue of one rule for politicians and another rule for the rest of us. Whilst Reeves has faced no consequences for her thoughtlessness, A-Level students who lift passages from unacknowledged sources, whether knowing it to be proscribed or not, are given zero for their essays. University undergraduates are expelled from university and PhDs are failed for the same thing. Reeves, on the other hand, exists in the Westminster bubble where the game of life is played oh so differently. Moreover, she is a woman of the left, so expect her critics to be shut down with the accusation that they are misogynists if they press their critique too hard.
What is sad is that Reeves’ book is important and for many, she has ruined it. There are female economists whose brilliance has been unacknowledged, such as that of Anna Jacobson Schwartz, whose contribution to Milton Friedman’s ground breaking book, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, was downplayed to the extent that in Milton’s Nobel announcement, the book was presented as solely his work. (To Milton’s credit, he applied great pressure on Columbia University to award Schwartz a PhD when male members of the economics faculty doubted a woman could make a great economist.) I have a good friend whose wife, when she studied economics at the LSE in the mid-sixties, was not awarded the first class degree she deserved because she was a woman. In writing so badly and being allowed to do so by her publisher (and publishers are usually scrupulous in this matter) Reeves has sabotaged her own book. Who wants to read a text that has in part been cobbled together by cut and paste?
If, as Mark Carney avouches, Reeves is a brilliant economist, it is time for her to show that she is. Reeves ought to fulfil her promise and rewrite the book, with fulsome acknowledgement of her sources and an equally fulsome apology. She ought also to reconsider her title. Women have not ‘made’ modern economics anymore than men have. To say so is feminist hubris. It has been a joint effort, though the role of women has been overlooked and poorly rewarded. Reeves had a chance to show this, but by the standards of A-Level coursework mark schemes, she deserves zero.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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