What Rachel Reeves’s book blunder reveals

Shadow chancellor’s Rachel Reeves’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was meant to put the spotlight on unsung female economists. Instead, the focus has fallen back on Reeves herself – and not for the reason she hoped.

Reeves has denied plagiarism after it emerged that the book is littered with passages from other sources, including Wikipedia, apparently lifted without proper acknowledgment. The Financial Times found more than 20 examples of bits in the book with glaring similarities to text from elsewhere.

This is clearly very embarrassing for Reeves, whose office has said ‘These were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints’. But there is more to this than a story about whether or not Reeves did borrow a bit too liberally from Wikipedia. What this debacle seems to me to confirm is that Reeves doesn’t have an original thought in her head, nor any real understanding of economics, so she is reduced to copying stuff out instead.