Have Harald Uhlig & Company Read Lisa Cook’s Paper at All? Answer: No
& BRIEFLY NOTED: FOR 2022-02-15 Tu
First: Question: Have Harald Uhlig & Company Read Lisa Cook’s Paper at All? Answer: No
Only somebody who has not read the paper, and does not care that they have not read the paper, would say so.
So last Wednesday I was peacefully working away, reached the end of one task, filed it away, decided to check to see if any emails I needed to deal with had come in over the past eight hours, and found:
Chris Brunet <chrisbrunet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.org>: I saw you signed this letter: <https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/NEA%20support%20statement%20signatories%20in%20columns[1].pdf>. I am trying to find one person among the 500 of you who is brave enough to respond to this blog post: <https://haralduhlig.blogspot.com/2022/02/lisa-cook-has-been-nominated-to-federal.html>
More specifically, I am looking for a comment on whether or not you think Cook's signature publication, "Violence and economic activity: evidence from African-American patents, 1870-1940", is fatally flawed as Uhlig suggests. Do you agree with Uhlig's assessment of this paper? Is this paper fatally flawed? Why or why not? You have 24 hours to respond.
So I wrote back, immediately: I’ve engaged with Harald before, and found it a waste of time. He’s not a data person… When Lisa came to Berkeley to present this, we gave her a hard time on the data point, and she convinced us that it was a real discontinuity in patenting, and not simply a failure to identify patents by Blacks. People who had been patenting in the 1890s, and ought to have been patenting in the 1900s, weren't, IIRC...
Chris Brunet: Huh. When I hear that people who had been patenting in the 1890s, and ought to have been patenting in the 1900s, weren't, My first instinct is to think "they must have stopped harvesting data on those people", not, "Oh, those people must have become less innovative and stopped wanting to patent"
So I wrote back again: Her problem was not in finding patents patents are indexed by name Dash — figuring out which names are those of African-American inventors. Once you find an inventor, you can track his patents throughout his career whether or not they ended up in Baker’s sample. That said, my view was it is that some of the circa 1900 decline is very likely to be a coverage issue. But data work is very hard, and sniping at data imperfections is very easy. My rule-of-thumb has always been that it is those people who put in the work to try to make better data have standing to criticize past efforts at data work — thus Christina Romer got her standing to criticize Stan Lebergott. That rule of thumb has kept me from wasting a lot of time.
You know, if someone were brought to you, and you were told that they had been deputy team lead for financial regulation and such issues during a presidential transition, had been the point staff economist for the White House on the Eurozone dimension of the 2008 to 2012 financial crisis, had been a special advisor to the secretary of the treasury on finance and development, and had been a Hoover Institution National Fellow, your reaction would not have been “this is an unqualified person put forward to advance some sinister non-technocratic agenda”, let alone someone put forward because she strokes the “erogenous zones of progressives”.
I confess I did not think we would get to calling Lisa Cook a whore in the first week of this.
Chris Brunet: I admit I had never heard of George Will before, since I am Canadian, and can only keep track of so many pundits. I have no strong opinions on his "erogenous zones" analogy.
At this point, I decided that I had spent enough time wading in this particular pool of muck—somebody who claims to have never heard of George F. Will and to have no opinion about whether one should or should not—genteely, for George F. Will learned at Bill Buckley’s knee how to do this, so that he can pretend that was not what he meant, while leaving no real doubt in anyone’s mind that that was what he meant—call a Black woman a whore is just not worth engaging.
But I did file this away, thinking that I really should reread Lisa Cook (2014) <http://econ.msu.edu/papers/cook/Violence%20and%20Economic%20Activity.pdf>, and last night I did so:
I had failed to bring to mind that her responses to the data questions were not just that “there is a break not just in the aggregate series but in individual inventors’ patenting patterns around 1900”, but that also there was a broader sharp fall in entrepreneurial activity by African-Americans: newspapers, for example. After checking, other people at the seminar I saw say that they thought this figure did the most in putting to rest fears that all of the ca.-1900 decline was a data artifact. If it is all a data artifact, it is a very broad one:
I had failed to bring to mind that her first—her very first—set of regression results, in Table 6, dummies out the pre-1900 data—the computer is looking for patterns in the 20th century and patterns in the 19th century, and is paying no attention to the sharp drop at the century boundary:
Her second, panel, set of regression results in Table 7 does, for the most part, use the ca.-1900 decline as part of its identifying variance. But column 6, which looks only at the 1918-1940 sample, does not. It looks as though the computer does take the time-series dimension of the absence of riots and the boom in inventive activity from 1880-1895 as its signal that white violence in the form of race-riots is substantially correlated with low patenting, but even in the post-WWI sample there is plenty of cross-sectional state identifying variation for the computer to judge that places where there are a lot of lynchings are places where it is very unhealthy to be a Black inventor as well:
My conclusion?
I do not think Harald Uhlig has read Lisa Cook’s paper at all.
If you read the paper, you noticed that Table 6 and column 6 of Table 7 did not rest at all on the apparent sharp decline in African-American patenting in 1900. That possible data discontinuity is not a “fatal flaw”. Nobody who had read the paper would call it such.
It’s an issue with the series, and a factor to be worried about in evaluating columns (1)-(5) of Table 7. But, then, in good papers there are always data issues.
But “fatal flaw'“? Only somebody who has not read the paper, and does not care that they have not read the paper, would say so.
One Video:
Asianometry: How Japan Won Lithography <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjQMcWqLJug>:
One Picture:
The woman in the center—Mnesarete of Thespiai, the favored model for Aphrodite in Athens in the age of Aristotle—is, in the historical record, nicknamed “Phryne”, “Toad”, for her attractive yellowish-brown skin, so unlike the corpse-like pallor of Thracian or Gaulish barbarians from the north:
19th-century whitewashing, much?
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"EROGENOUS ZONES" is a typical right-wing commnet --calling attention to the fact that left-wingers have biological functions.. Somehow it is meant to embarrass--It doesn't add anything toi the discussion. Allen Kamp
Thanks for posting that Kleinhans & Hess paper, very informative.