Earlier: Sailer In TakiMag: Biden Fed Nominee Lisa Cook's Half-Cooked History
Most academic disciplines have extremely unofficial “Job Market Rumors” forums for anonymous disgruntled unemployed Ph.D.’s and grad students to discuss where they can get a job, along with topics of related interest such as the shortcomings of professors with jobs. These websites for the underemployed tend to be dominated by the concerns of the least privileged groups in today’s academic hiring environment, such as white men, so that topics such as affirmative action, which the media treats as unmentionably sacrosanct, are often rudely discussed.
The Economics Job Market Rumors discussion board is particularly disrespectful of their betters, since economics requires math skills and attracts less politically correct academics. Not surprisingly, powerful economists, especially ones who are members of privileged groups who benefit from affirmative action, want to silence this forum. From Bloomberg News:
‘Cesspool’ Website Under Fire as Economists Confront Harassment
Supporters of more action wore #MeToo pins to raise awareness
‘We have got to do something and silence’ is not an option
Economists call for more action on harassment at the 2023 American Economic
By Catarina Saraiva
January 8, 2023 at 10:41 AM PSTEconomists are zeroing in on a website rife with sexual harassment and bullying content in their efforts to curb the behavior that has long plagued the profession.
At this year’s meeting in New Orleans of the American Economic Association, the field’s largest professional organization, a group of mostly female economists urged it to take steps to help take down the independent website that AEA President Christina Romer referred to as a “cesspool.”
From Wikipedia: “Christina Duckworth Romer (née Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration.”
“We have got to do something and silence, I believe, is not an option,” said Martha Olney, a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.
The comments, made during a panel convened to discuss harassment issues, were met with applause.
The website, Economics Job Market Rumors, hosted by an unknown individual and allowing users to post anonymously, started out as a place for economists to share information about hiring activity in the field in 2008, before Twitter was widely used.
It has since become a venue to showcase the darkest aspects of the profession’s culture, a place where egregious commentary can be aired with little consequence.
Olney pointed to Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s nomination process as evidence of the website’s wider influence and potential impact on individual’s careers.
Cook, the first Black woman appointed to the Board of Governors, was confirmed by the Senate in May in the face of a united Republican campaign against her, with GOP leadership saying she held far-left views that would risk politicizing the central bank.
Lisa Cook, of course, is a new Governor of the Federal Reserve Board despite her only well-known paper (on black patent holders of a century ago) being a confused fiasco, as I demonstrated recently in Taki’s Magazine in “Half-Cooked Data.” She was nominated by Joe Biden as part of the Biden Administration’s campaign to nominate black women at rates disproportionate to the share of the population, much less their share of qualifications, and was approved via a tie-breaker vote by Kamala Harris, another black woman picked by Biden for no other reason than being black and a woman.
