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A new book by Rachel Reeves, shadow chancellor, has been found to contain examples of apparent plagiarism, including entire sentences and paragraphs lifted from other sources without acknowledgment.
The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, included reproduced material from online blogs, Wikipedia, The Guardian and a report foreword by Labour MP Hilary Benn without acknowledging the sources.
More than 20 examples were spotted by Financial Times reporters using manual checks rather than plagiarism detection software.
Publisher Basic Books admitted: “When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. We acknowledge this did not happen in every case.”
Reeves’s book also included reworked paragraphs and sentences where details including names and adjectives had been swapped around but the bulk of the material remained unchanged.
Some biographical text about women economists spotlighted by Reeves, who hopes to become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour wins the next election, was lifted wholesale from Wikipedia.
But allies of Reeves, a former Bank of England economist, argued that the key theme of the book was about how women economists had shaped the shadow chancellor’s thinking, and strongly denied plagiarism.
A spokesperson for Reeves said: “We strongly refute the accusation that has been put to us by this newspaper. These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints.”
Basic Books said that at no point did Reeves seek to present as original research the details flagged by the FT. “There is an extensive and selective bibliography of over 200 books, articles and interviews,” the publisher said. “Where facts are taken from multiple sources, no author would be expected to reference each and every one.”
The book credits researchers who were involved in the project: it is thought they were involved in factual research and compiling the bibliography.
One of the book’s themes is women not receiving credit for their work or ideas. Reeves writes that there is reason to believe Mary Paley Marshall’s input into the writing of her more famous husband Alfred Marshall probably went unrecognised. She cites Milton Friedman saying that “Anna [Schwartz] did all of the work, and I got most of the recognition.”
Most of the instances of copied phrasing contain biographical information. For example, “Lawrencina was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, Lawrence Heyworth, whose own family had been weavers in Bacup in Lancashire” is written both on Wikipedia and in Reeves’s book. The two versions differ only in their spelling of Lawrencina.
In one case an entire paragraph, about the relationship between the writer H.G. Wells and the economist Beatrice Webb, is very similar to one written in Webb’s Wikipedia page. The sentence “He responded by lampooning the couple in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators” is matched word for word.
In another case, Hilary Benn, now the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, wrote on the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change website: “When we were elected in 1997, the amount of aid we gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and was just 0.26 per cent. By the time we left office, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of Whitehall.”
Reeves writes: “When Labour was elected in 1997, the amount of aid the UK gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and stood at just 0.26 per cent. By the end of Labour’s time in office, in 2010, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent target. This was down to the political leadership of Blair and Gordon Brown — and their first Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 to 2002, Clare Short, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of government.”
Additional reporting by Rafe Uddin, Stephanie Stacey and Euan Healy in London
Reeves
Lawrencina was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, Lawrence Heyworth, whose own family had been weavers at Bacup in Lancashire
rethinkingpoverty.org.uk
Laurencina was the daughter of a Liverpool merchant, Lawrence Heyworth, whose own family had been weavers at Bacup in Lancashire
Reeves
When Labour was elected in 1997, the amount of aid the UK gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding eighteen years and stood at just 0.26 per cent. By the end of Labour’s time in office, in 2010, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – and their first Secretary of State for International Development from 1997 to 2002, Clare Short, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of government.
Hilary Benn
When we were elected in 1997, the amount of aid we gave as a proportion of our national income had halved over the preceding 18 years and was just 0.26 per cent. By the time we left office, we were on our way to achieving the 0.7 per cent target. This was down to the political leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who brought the lives of the world’s poorest people into the heart of Whitehall.
Reeves
Once, when entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers, so she took them off there and then!
The Guardian
Once, entering a smart restaurant in Boston, she was told that ladies were not admitted in trousers. She simply took them off.
Reeves
For her part, Beatrice voiced disapproval of Wells’s ‘sordid intrigue’ with the daughter of a veteran Fabian member. He responded by lampooning the couple in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators.
Wikipedia
For her part, Beatrice voiced disapproval of Wells’ “sordid intrigue” with the daughter of a veteran Fabian Sydney Olivier. He responded by lampooning the couple in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators.
Reeves
Initiated by Pember Reeves, the Fabian Women’s Group Motherhood Special Fund Committee began a study of the domestic lives of families with new babies living on a subsistence wage of about a pound a week.
Wikipedia
Initiated by Reeves in 1909, the FWG’s Motherhood Special Fund Committee began a study of the domestic lives of families with new babies living on a subsistence wage of about a pound a week.
Reeves
Rent-seeking (a concept popularised by Krueger but first identified by Adam Smith) occurs when interest groups lobby for government favours in the form of tariffs, patents, subsidies, import quotas and other market regulations.
Rent-seeking behaviour is inefficient because it manipulates the existing market, rather than creating new wealth – the ‘rent-seeker’ contributes nothing to productivity in return for the favour.
Krueger argues that rent-seeking behaviour in the form of restricting imports means consumers carry the ‘welfare costs’ of tariffs – they pay the price for the rent-seekers’ behaviour.
Krueger also argues that rent-seeking behaviour breeds further rent-seeking behaviour by creating an economic environment where rent-seeking is the only way to successfully enter the market. In markets dominated by rent-seeking, new firms must dedicate their resources to lobbying for advantages. In 2011, Krueger’s article was named, by the American Economic Association, one of the twenty best articles in the first hundred years of the American Economic Review.
Wikipedia
Rent seeking occurs when interest groups lobby for government favors in the form of tariffs, patents, subsidies, import quotas, and other market regulations.
Rent-seeking behavior is inefficient because it manipulates the existing market, rather than creating new wealth.
Krueger says rent-seeking behavior in the form of import restrictions carry the welfare costs of tariffs, as well as an additional welfare cost due to rent-seeking behavior.
She also claims that rent-seeking behavior breeds more rent-seeking behavior by creating an economic environment where participating in rent-seeking is the only way to enter the market.
In markets dominated by rent-seeking, new firms must dedicate their resources to rent-seeking rather than using their resources to develop technology. In 2011, Krueger’s article was named one of the twenty best articles in the first hundred years of the American Economic Review by the American Economics Association.
Reeves
Keynes’s key argument was that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment from which the economy would not automatically rebound.
Wikipedia
He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and since wages and labour costs are rigid downwards the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment.