Lisa Cook on Gender and Race in Economics (Podcast)

little interesting tidbits to ask them. But as I'm doing the research and working off of some of the questions that bat Nick got to me, we ended up finding these really amazing research papers that she put together, some stuff that just the data is shocking, and it's amazing that nobody thought to even look at this before. She found out that the number of African American women who were earning their PhD was under one percent of the

total PhDs. That's a pretty shocking statistic. And her research on patents and the impact of racism and what she called extra judicial executions or lynchings um has a huge impact on on what patents are awarded and subsequent innovation in an economy. Some of the stories she told about taking what she found two various Nobel laureate economists, expecting them to trash her research, and they're all like, this

is amazing. You gotta go publish this. Milton Friedman, champion free market, said, Hey, this is interfering with the free market. You have to publish this. This is absolutely fascinating. It's a really incredible tale. She's gotten a really fascinating background.

If you're at all paying attention to the news these days, and you're interested in institutional racism or sexism, or why the economy works better for some people than others, you're gonna find this to be really a fascinating discussion, data based, objective, and really really intriguing. So, with no further ado, my conversation with Michigan State Universities Lisa Cook. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special

guest this week is Lisa Cook. She is the professor of economics and International Relations at Michigan State University. She is a Marshall Scholar who got her pH d in economics at Berkeley. She was a researcher for the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, Lisa Cook, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you so much so, Lisa, I have to ask what drove you towards a career in economics, Verry. That's a really good question, and I have a couple of answers.

One is not as I have looked back on it over the last year or so, I think one of the important trips that we took every year was to a place called Soul City, North Carolina. My cousin, Employed McKissick, was starting the city from scratched. He was He was a protester along with Martin Luther King and marched with him. Was in the class of at Morehouse College, integrated the University of North Carolina. You know, just really active on

many different fronts. But he was building a city from scratch. And this is something we saw every summer, from one trailer to two trailers, to three trailers, to a building that housed IBM, two more buildings. And what he had to do was to essentially plan an economy. And I think that that notion is something that really started turning the wheels for me. How do you how do you plan an economy and how do you try to close

the racial wealth gap. This was a multi cultural effort, but the emphasis was trying to create some good jobs so that the racial wealth gap would be closed. Now this is in the sixties and seventies, so that's that's one answer. That's that's upon a lot of reflection recently. But I would say that at Oxford, when I was trying to decide on one of the three topics I was to study, when in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, I took this mathematical economics tutorial. It was so much fun.

It's a grad student teaching it, and I kept telling myself, there cannot be a field. Is this much fun? Can't be? Can't be? So I kept putting it off. I climbed Killamandara with this Cambridge training the economists, and he convinced me that no, I should not go off to LSE and do a PhD and mathematical logic, which is what I was planning. I should do a PhD in economic So in five hours he convinced me that this is what I should do. So I think that's the answer

to your question. Did you know you were always heading towards academia and I have to point out your doctoral advisors were Barry Iken Green and David Rohmer. That's some pretty big firepower, that's right. I am not certain that I was always headed to academia. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, certainly because so many people in my family and around me were involved in the

Civil rights movement. One of the things that I thought about all the time was was making sure that voting rights were protected, and the way to do that was through the law off And it wasn't until uh much later, during this period of climbing, for example, UH and trying to figure out whether it's going to do economics or not, that I rejected the law. But I didn't think I was going into academia if I did uh the law. I think there's a lot of historiesis among economists and

among academics in general. So most of my relatives were in some form of academia. So I certainly got a lot of exposure to it, but I wasn't convinced that that's what I wanted wanted to do. My advisors, whether they were hormal or informal at um at Spellman and at Berkeley, were just off the charts amazing. One of

them was. It was Donald mental Store who was president of Stollman College at the time and at one point at the college board and absolute mentor and helped too, you know, encourage me to apply for the marshal and for the roads and other uh take advantage of other opportunities. Marjorite Gant, who was our Study Abroad coordinator, also a

deep mentor. And then at Berkeley, Uh, it was Paul Rohmer in addition to the people on my committee George Acolos, when I talked to all the time, especially about Russian and the thing about choosing the topic that I did to study the Russian banking system. Now this was in the early nineties, right, So we were trying to figure out what are the best models to analyze the Russian economy with? Is this banking system like another? Is it

forming like others? Can it form like others? How does one allocate credit on a market basis when it hasn't been before or recently? So I was looking for anybody who could elucidate this, and I was just grateful that people talk to me and we're willing to serve on my committee to help me home these questions. So yeah, very very Uh, fantastic person my committee, David Romer. Clearly, I liked macro right, I liked international topics, and I just had a wonderful time at Berkeley with with all

of them. You've done some really fascinating research, and we're going to talk in a few minutes about your research into patents and innovation. But I have to ask about what led to the op ed you wrote a couple of years ago in the New York Times where you pointed out that just yearro point six of economics PhD s were awarded to black women. What was that pieces

genesis and what sort of feedback did it create? There were two sources of that article that up ed. The first was that the A a American Economic Association had done a climate survey and I was on the committee to write up the results. And it was astonishing the kind of comments, especially that we got from people in the profession. Uh. You know, we learned a lot from that, as you can recall, we learned a lot about how widespread sexual harassment was. We learned that people were not

feeling included in economics for various reasons. We knew that, uh, we suspected that promotion and pay were a problem with respect to UH, minority women, but we didn't know the extent to which that was the case. And certainly we didn't know that African American women were the ones who had to take more steps to avoid discrimination and that they were the ones reporting the most discrimination. So that

was worrisome in and of itself. So definitely one of the motivations for writing the APT ed to talk more about that. And and again the comments were terrified. Uh. One of them let the article, if I were to advise my son, I would tell them not to go into economics, and I regret having gone into it. This person implied that she was a black woman. Uh. There

was another comment that really hit home. Uh, why is it that all of these prizes are given and no African Americans ever win these prizes like Nobel nan on the day that the novel is being awarded, Uh, like the Nobel How can that be welcoming? How can that be serious? If our research isn't being taken seriously, our careers aren't being taken seriously. And the other motivation, So one motivation was the climate study. The other one was

as director of the American Economic Association summer program. I noticed that there weren't too many black women, and I thought, Okay, I know that black women out number of black men and the stem fields and undergraduate so what is going on here? So I certainly put it at the top of my list to try to recruit more black women to apply to the A A Summer program and to UH to get them to think more seriously about doing a PhD in economics, and this was the way to

do it. So I had those two sources that led to that op ed and would respect to the action. The reaction has has largely, I would say, been good, UH in the sense that it got a conversation started. It doesn't even feel like it's just been a year ago. So much has happened in the year. So even if people were talking about it in the last year before say the work from home period, before the pandemic, before UH George Floyd, people were embracing this notion that this

wasn't just one person. And I think that that in economics many of us were often told that, well, that's anyosyncratic and you're overreacting. But when you see the results from the climate survey from you know, nine thousand respondents. We see a pattern, and we see a pattern with respect to pay promotion, UH and and the climate in economics. So I would say that in hindsight it was it was well received because of the kinds of conversation it started.

The SAD collective has taken off. It was UH. It got started as they well, I wouldn't say as a result of but certainly the founders are my former students in the A A Summer program. But a lot has happened in just that short year, and I think I'm just grateful to see the movement and hope it is

sustained within the economics field. There's a lot more going on, not just what I'm saying, you know, renaming UH lecturers and making the place more welcoming for all kinds of people, being more open about mental health again, about being inclusive in so many different ways. I think this is just historic. This is an historic change for the American Economic Association. Quite fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about another piece

of your research that that I find absolutely fascinating. You've documented some pretty dramatic differences in patent rates based on race and gender. Tell us a little bit about that. This research came from my dissertation emerged from my dissertation being written in Moscow and on the Russian banking system. I interviewed both bankers and entrepreneurs trying to figure out if a Russian banking system could emerge in this post

Soviet period. So this is the early nineties. It was a rough and tumble time when major banker on averages are being killed per month. It was a time when UH structures were being figured out as long as as well as the personalities who would engage in banking in in Russia. One thing they post, the questions they post to me UH had a couple of features. One common

one was why can't innovation come to Russia? And I thought it was fascinating because it had nothing to do with the Russian banking system really, and that they wanted to know for me, You're American, You're an economist, to tell us why this is the case. And I told him I have no answer, really don't have an answer. But you know, I kind of looked around and I'm like, Okay, well, if I were an inventor, I'm not sure i'd feel secure here. I'm not sure. I thought that my ideas

would be protected. But anyway, I put a put a placeholder in it, and I thought, after I finished my dissertation, maybe I'll come back to it, and it kept weighing on me. This question, I thought was a really good one because at the time, the conventional wisdom was that if you protected if a country protected intellectual property rights, that was sufficient for innovation to come from, then in innovation to come. And I thought the Russians deserve a

better answer than this. So I wondered if there were an historical experiment that could inform what the Russians were going through. And I thought, well, maybe this period of the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds could be elucidating. And I just decided that maybe, you know, maybe I'll look at patents to see what's going on there. Of course, I thought it was going to be easy to find African American patents. Of course it wasn't because races it

recorded on patent data. So that was a big undertaking to match names to people in the patent data set. So tell us a little bit how you were able to figure out the race of people who were applying for patent protection. Hundred and fifty years ago. How are you able to get through what was a pretty bare bones database within the government to find out who actually, um, we're applying for these patents? That was that's a good question.

I tried everything. I tried everything. So the first thing that I did was to try to do what Mo Nathan and Trauma Trauma Mo Nathan did and others who study black names in the contemporary period. I tried to do what they did, and I tried to take data from the Census and UH find the most popular names UH, ones that were distinctively African American. And I did it for this period, but those those don't apply. The names they use were post Civil Rights era names, they weren't historical.

So I decided that I needed to do that for the historical period, and that's how I came up with the first recording of systematic names that black names historically for African Americans. And I did that by using the Census again. UH. Luckily, later on my co authors Tuvon Logan and John Parman helped to externally validate that list. But that was the first time that such a list existed. So that was the first thing that I had to do. But after I did that only a few people that pattern.

There were only a few patent taes who had these black names, so I was able to capture some, but not many. Then I resorted to a common myth about African American names related to naming people, especially men, after presidents. So started looking for presidents. Okay, so what happens is that all men in America have named that are uh, those of presidents. So this is you know, this wasn't

unique to African American. So that didn't help. So I just started looking for all of the scientists potential inventors I could to try to capture the universe of inventors some way, say with directories with articles. I found this old UH survey of patent agents and patent attorneys that was carried out in UH nine hundred and in nineteen thirteen by the Patent Office trying to identify African American patentees. Now that was good for that period up to roughly

nineteen thirteen, but there were some flaws. It didn't actuately identify the first African American patent he so there were there were a few holes, so I had to fill those. But I started looking for everything and I wanted it to not be biased towards famous people, because I mean, the patent data set itself is not biased towards famous people. I looked at obituaries, for example, just because people would talk about their family members as inventors and they may

not have described themselves that way. And say the census, I mean Edison identified himself as a machinist, and many of these inventors described themselves as a machinists in the census data. But if you got family members to talk about them, they would describe themselves as inventors. So anyway, I tried everything I could and eventually I was able to fill this in UM, but it took a lot of work. This is pre Google patents. This is before

this is all of this was digitized. This is ancient history now, but things were changing rapidly at the time. But that's how I came up with this list of African American inventors. And now let's put a little meat on the bones. The piece who wrote Violence and Economic Activity Evidence from African American Patents eighteen seventy ninety. The

numbers are pretty astonishing. Patent put in the US per million, so on a per capita basis, it's six patents per million African Americans, forty patents per million women, and two hundred and thirty five patents per million for all others. That's really a stark difference, that's right, And that's that's for the modern period that includes data up to twenty so uh after the nineteen data, but certainly it's still

the case. The reason why it's still failient is because eight nine is still the peak year for African American patenting per capita. That's what what are the stark things that we learn and this paper that white patenting is two orders of magnitude higher, patenting by women is one order of magnitude higher. And the size of a patent team and a teen for African Americans is the same

size today if we're using data. That is astonishing because for the rest of patent tas these patent teams have exploded, especially we're talking say chemical patents, it wouldn't be unusual to find twenty or thirty people on patent for uh some chemical products. So this is this is one of the astonishing things about about this number that is is

really starks. And one thing that I found in doing deep dives to biographies of some of these inventors, say Garrett Morgan, he led completely different lives from their counterparts like Edison or for for Garrett Morgan it would have been Charles Brush and Cleveland. They just had to work so many channels, many back channels. For example, to be able to sell their wares, he had to dress up like a nave of American to be able to display

his gas mask. Because once it was found out that he was African American and this gas mask was being used by fire departments, uh oh, across the South, they started canceling their orders. And the fire departments all across the country, but the ones in the South started canceling their orders. He used to hire white men to pretend like they were him and go around the country to

self his gas mask. So he was really adept at overcoming is increasing consumers side discrimination in America at the time. So how do we explain why patents peaked for African Americans in what was so significant about what happened right afterwards? I think that it was largely Plusy versus Ferguson. So that was in eighteen ninety six, and this was the culmination of a long period of repealing pieces of the

Civil Rights Act of eighteen seventy five. And this was you know, this is the Seven States were challenging it bit by bit, tipping away at it bit by bit, and when plus they happened, it was, you know, it was a big blow. Separate but equals, So this is ruling on separate but equal um. This is this is a big blow because inventors at the time, we're doing what everybody else was doing. Right. They were they were going to libraries to find patent digests to find out

what the latest inventions were. They were running into each other at their patent attorney's office or uh in the downtowns of all of these places where they were working. But all of a sudden that wasn't possible anymore. These commercial districts became all white. Uh. They weren't able to manufacture and sell their inventions. They had to often become middlemen and to become wholesalers so that they weren't facing the public. Some of them went out of business altogether

and stopped inventing all together. We have a number of stories like that. So I think it was largely this growing violence and especially plusy versus instance. And with respect to the date, what my friends who are constitutional law scholars tell me is that this takes a period of time, say two or three years for rulemaking, and when it became clear that they couldn't engage in in this, I think that they rushed everything they could to the patent office and uh and hope for the best, and it

just never happened. Now, it started recovering after some of the violence stopped, but it never got back to the EAK. And that's really astonishing because there's there are a lot more people, a lot more PhDs and and the natural sciences for example, a lot more PhDs and engineering, but we don't see this showing up in the patent data. So earlier this year, the Tulsa race massacre was in the news, the President was going to hold a rally

on the anniversary of that. What was the impact of that events on subsequent patents and innovations in the African American community, so very that's a really interesting question. This is one of those things where you see the data and you have no idea what's going on. Like I was, I was thinking, Okay, why is this showing up in the data, what like what happened on a national scale. I'm thinking, okay, so World War one is over. Yeah. I could not put my finger on it. And then

I was like, ah ha, that's not good. The This was the largest racial massacre in US history and it had an impact on everybody. John Hope Franklin wrote about it, the famous historian, wrote about it. He was actually a child UH in that massacre and his family business was torn up just like many others and destroyed. Lots of people died, and he was saying that there was this fear that permeated all African Americans because, as the commission

that investigated this said, no one was safe. There was failure at every level of government, at the local level, at the state level, and the president at the time refused to UH end the violence that was happening there, and the n double a c P President UH went to see him to try to negotiate an end to this. But it was it was really serious and that it showed up in the data, and I couldn't make it, couldn't make it go away. It was just that series. There was no there was no other year like that.

Besides besides quite fascinating, let's talk a little bit about what's going on in the profession of economics. You've attended fairly traditional economics program, you've taught at traditional schools. What do you think are some of the bigger changes that's taking place today versus back when you were a student. There was no conversation about why African Americans are missing in economics. When I was in college or even in

graduate school, there was no conversation like that. Even though there was a longstanding program the a a summer program which I now direct him, which I did at Stanford, there was no broad conversation about that. There was no

broad conversation about out what was wrong with the economics profession. Um. You know, I wish that I had heard the Planet Money series that was done about my paper, both the topic and my paper, because I think that that there would have been more realization by many people and by those who were trying to get into the field that what they were facing they weren't facing alone. So I think that that's the biggest change. There was no letter, uh that many people have read, say by Bill Spiggs,

that was widely circulated. You didn't have a president of a felleral reserve Bank at all. Number one, you certainly didn't see anybody in that leadership position. Uh. There were members of the of the f O m C who were African American, certainly, uh Emmitt Rice was one of the first ones, and you know I knew about them, but it didn't seem tangible, especially for for black women.

And I think that this open conversation is not something that anybody could have anticipated that has moved very far in a very short period of time that we would even try to count how many African American economists that are at the Fellow Reserves. I never heard such questions post and certainly never thought, you know that I would hear Nobel laureates telling me, you've got to publish this. This is this is groundbreaking work. You've got to publish this.

Had no idea that this would be uh the case, or that they would be as interested as they were and and proved to be, and certainly grateful for it. But I didn't think of it at all when I was coming through the educational system. So over the summer, a former Federal Reserve researcher, Claudia Psam, She also was a researcher at the CEO posted a fiery blog post quote economics as a disgrace and lays out a lot

of the specifics that you're discussing. What are your thoughts on her criticism of the profession and what are the role of politics in economics? That's a good question. Now I have to tell you that I didn't read the actual blog post because I I understand that I am in it and I really at that time didn't want to this, could not deal with it emotionally because I've been talking about this a lot, talking about economics the

economics profession a lot. But Claudia I think is and has been a catalyst for a lot of frank discussions in economics. And because she's been in this special rarefied place of being at the subtle reserves of uh having this somb rule you know. Uh, there are very few few rules named after in macro named after women having been at c A. She has been at the top of the field in so many different ways, so she has a special place, uh from which she sits and

can see the profession, the broad profession. And she's also not a phrase because she is uh interacted with the current and former presidents as the A a Uh, Janet Yellen and Ben Bernankee, so she she could address them as colleagues, as peers. And I think it has been she's fonstered this this very necessary conversation. And she's been an advocate for graduate students, for people who have felt uh sexually harassed or racially harassed in the economics profession.

And you know, the ambuts person and then quite engage. We finally hired an ombuts person UH at the American Economic Association. We needed somebody if we were going to say these problems exist, we needed somebody to do something about them. It's not perfect yet, that mechanism is not perfect yet. But I appreciate people who are as engaged as Claudis. And she does a lot to mentor the next generation of economists, and not just women, and not

just at or Americans, not just African American women. She spends time during this this season preparing, helping people to prepare for the job market. She reads their paper. She is providing many different public goods for the profession. And I just think that she's she's just a gym and the profession that we need more people like her who will hold our leaders accountable, point point to the issues, but also try to figure out ways to address those issues.

And she's a problem solver. I mean, thesembile was created as a mechanism to solve a problems. She talks about automatic stabilizes and writes about this. So she's she's a problem solver in every dimension. To appreciate her being in the profession, quite interesting. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on today with the recession. What is this doing too? Some and wealth inequality. I'm not sure it could do more. I'm not sure this pandemic could do more.

It is really driving a serious wedge between those who have income and wealth and those who doubt. Whether we're talking about those who hold stocks and those who don't. And uh, just under of Americans do not hold any stock. They are not seeing the gains the stock market has largely recovered from uh, the beginning of the pandemic. That we did see this in the Great Recession too, so that's not so unusual that that stocks would cover before

employment does. But income inequality is taking a beating. How is that because let's say, if we add a racial dimension to it, African Americans are subject to occupational segregation. So they are in a lot of these front facing occupations to which they would be disproportionately exposed to COVID nineteen. So that's one way in which they're deciding between a job and eating or a job and rent a job in their health. So so this is one of the ways and which income and equality has come to for

for wealth inequality, it's even more stark. So as I was mentioning, Uh, certainly the stock market is recovering, Uh, not as many people among African Americans are in the stock market. Uh. Certainly, wealth is orders of magnitude lower for African American healthhold compared to white healthhold. But there's one thing that I followed that really troubles me, and that is small businesses. There are fifty white entrepreneurs for

every black entrepreneur. And as we know, this is a tried and true path to the middle class and to wealth accumulation in America. And what we know about black businesses is that a disproportionate number are reporting closing permanently as a result of the recession, the pandemic and recession, and they didn't receive PPP funds. Uh, we're not recording.

SBA is not recording the applicants, and we don't have good demographic data, but from the surveys that have been done, we know that when they replied, when they applied, they were rejected. You know, this is due to the big banks being relied upon to UH to all out these moments, but also for the amount they were requesting, they got

disproportionately less. So what I worry about is this fisher growing significantly, not just now but in the future, because certainly income now lays the groundwork for WELCO in the future. So given the sort of work from home pandemic economy that we're living in, some people have been calling this a quote she session unquote because so much of it is falling disproportionately on the shoulders of women. How accurate

is that phrase? Is this overstanding it or is there really a deep gender fisher as well as a racial fisher. Absolutely there's a gender fisher that is that is also there with the racial fisher, and we could see this in American Time Youth Survey, in the Census. What we know about women is that regardless of occupation, regardless of income, they spend a disproportionate amount of time on care of

other individuals in the household. That might be children, that might be the elderly, but they spend more time taking care of those people. And that happened before. That was happening before the pandemic. And women are the ones who are having to drop out of the workforce while these students are stuck at home. Small children especially are stuck at home trying to do their homework or trying to make sure that they have their their snacks on time and get through their school work. So this is a

she session. Women are back at their participation rates from that is shocking, and were to happen in such a short period of time is absolutely shocking. And this is going to have lasting scars, leave lasting lasting scars on the labor market, because one thing we know is that when women are out of the labor force, they slow down with respect to you pay, with respect to your promotion.

And I am just hoping that we will get some kind of support for child care to make sure that that some of these women can recover and recover more quickly. Quite interesting, so the Care's Act was passed at the end of the first quarter, it was about three trillion dollars. If you would have asked me over the summer, will we see a follow up another couple of trillion dollars, I would have given you ten to one odds that absolutely.

The politicians in election here of course they're going to pass the second stimulus, But here we are, middle of October, no such stimulus passed yet? Did we go far enough with the first Cares Act? And are you at all surprised that there hasn't been a follow up? What do you think is going to happen? And how much stimulus has needed given the way the economy is starting to apply to and attenuate from from that big bounce back we saw over the summer. Barrett, you and I were

in the same position. That's exactly what I thought too, And what I knew was that we if we had a national coordinated strategy, we could possibly be seeing our way back to normalcy by this time, if we had a national mask mandate, for example. But that didn't happen. And what I find shocking is this three trillion dollars was was a good start, but we are repeating the

lessons of two thousand and eight, two thousand nine. I cannot believe this I was on the Obama transition team at the time, and what I was watching was austerity being put into place. And and I was also there in austerity being put into play when the last thing you needed was austerity. You need to throw money at people so that yes, they will stay stay afloat, whether it's businesses or households or the unemployed, they just need to stay afloat while we figure this pandemic out. And

and that is what is still needed. But we're repeating the mistakes of two two nine. What we see is state and local governments laying off people and and firing people. And this is what we saw before, and that's why the recovery has stalled. I can't believe that we're doing exactly the same thing. And that's why, like Claudia, I believe in automatic stabilizes. We've got to have more so that this is not j Pel begging Congress and the administration to do something and all of the other that

officials do. And and it is clear that physical policy is what is needed the mom it's ore the Federal Reserve aren't there. It's not as if they are are boundless in what they can do in the kinds of resources they can provide. They've been fast, they've been quick, but they can't do everything. So shocked that we haven't that the administration and Congress, the Senate Republicans have blocked aid to American people, households, and businesses. I think it's

absolutely unconsortable. There's definitely an eviction and rental crisis that is right at our feet. It's right in front of us, and we're not doing anything about it. Let me are closing and we're not doing anything about it. I'm just in shock. So let me step back and ask you the thirty thousand foot view question, which is we saw a very miserly stimulus at the beginning of oh nine.

It was I know, this sounds ridiculous to say, about eight hundred billion dollars which proved to be way too small. We saw the rise of austerity, not just here but also in the UK, and then in we saw a massive pro cyclical tax cut and stimulus. I thought the rule book was, hey, in a deep procession, you want to see countercyclical fiscal stimulus, not late cycle pro cyclical

fiscal stimulus. What's the lesson to be taken away from this that somebody is not telling the truth about BUDE deficits and about gross because what we know is that the short run deviations like two thousand and eight, two thousand nine, in order for them to remain short run deviations of output, you have to go big, and you have to assure the American people that something is on the way and that they won't be out there on

their own. And the same it's true for businesses. It is absolutely unconsortable that businesses that through no fall to their own are laying out tens of thousands of people. The airlines are laying off tens of thousands of people, and that's not going to affect just them. Of course, their dollar support many other jobs, and not just in the cities where there are hubbs. This is this isn't

this is true in general. So I'm still in shock that we are not doing more and that the lessons of the Great Recession have not been have not been learned. It's almost as if some folks were awake for the first two days of econ one oh one and just slept through the rest of the semester. They missed the chapter on Keynes. So here's the pushback. Hey, listen, we don't have access to infinite money. Three trillion dollars is a lot, and at a certain point we have to

start being concerned about the deficit. How do you respond to that sort of pushback? We do have to become concerned about the deficit, but that time is not now, absolutely not now. That would be misplaced. How do you how do you sustain growth? How do you how do you keep people afloat? How do you keep businesses afloat? That's the question we should be asking, and this is a common view of economists. Many economists, as you know, of all stripes, are saying the same thing. I'm saying

that we worry about deficits in the future. Let's, you know, when the economy gets back on the feet, let's start worrying about those deficits until then. It's it's abstract, it's you know, why why do you starve a person who's already hungry? That that is ridiculous. And if you hobble the economy. Now, let's say, for example, we could be using p PP to give to our smallest newest businesses.

If those smallest newest businesses don't stay a lot, we're going to permanently hit long run growth, because these are some of the businesses that give us innovation. This is where innovation comes from. Often it's from the smallest, newest businesses, and if we don't help them, what we are doing is saying we're not going to contribute innovation to long long run growth anymore. And that is really unconscionable. We shouldn't do that. We shouldn't penalize the economy that way.

Quite interesting. I know I only have you for a few minutes, so let me jump to my favorite questions that I ask all of my guests. Tell us what are you streaming? What are you watching or listening to these days now that we're all working from home. The first thing that I've been streaming has been uh Nollywood movies and TV series you know from from Nigeria and uh the the TV series that just so I'm really interesting is fifty And then there's this movie called Chief Daddy.

I'm also uh watching Chernobyl and I you know Chernobyl. I find fascinating. It was well done. I used to live and Russia, so I certainly know the story very well and studied the former Soviet Union quite a bit. But I can't watch it sometimes because it's so close to home, and I think it was an excellent series. I'm watching Ship's Creek. Uh so that's that that I'm not finished yet keeping it as a mini series for myself, and certainly I listened to uh Planet Money and Sereal.

Those are things that I stream a lot, so to the there those of day. You mentioned some of your early mentors previously. Tell us who helped shape your career. I will uh say from a distance. I told you some who were close to home, but you know, Barbara Jordan was one I was forced to watch by my grandmother her leading the impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon. Had no idea who she was, but my grandmother was saying, this is how democracy works. You've got to watch this,

this is how democracy works. So there was something that I found incredibly inspiring about Barbara Jordan's and Shirley chishol and I tried to understand how they got to know what they knew and started taking myself a lot more seriously as a person who was interested at some level in public service. Quite interesting. Tell us some of your favorite books. What what are you reading now and what

have what ends up on your all time favorite lists. Well, you know, one book that is my favorite book of the summer is a book that is non fixing, but it reads like fixing. It is so good. It is the World according to Fanny Davis by Bridget Davis, and it is about the underground economy, the numbers runners in Detroit. It's going to be turned into a movie and has been the subject of a number of MPR interviews. But I'm also reading books like um uh Mercia baradns Uh,

Bara Duran's uh The Color of Money. I'm reading um of course, Sandy Drity is from Here to Equality. You know, I'm just trying to learn as much as i can about the moment. I'm reading The deficit mess said that I can understand more about how we think about deficits. That's that's one way to think about, uh, deficits. But I am also rereading things like Moneyball. I used to teach the economics of baseball, and I would look forward to teaching it again. But that's just fought that, you know,

That's that's that's just fun. That's just economics for fun. So what sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate who was considering a career in economics. I would say to get as prepared as you can. And when I say prepared, I don't mean doing five or six pre doctors programs. Uh, maybe do do one or an r A ship. But get to know your professors are. Contact your professors if you've already graduated, and

read as much about the economy as you can. I think being anchored in you know, podcasts like like yours, or interviews like yours, reading Bloomberg and f T and uh the New York Times Business and Economics sections. I think having a point of reference is critical because I find that many many students don't. So I think that it's critical to have some some frame of reference. And I think it would be inspiring and interesting once you do,

quite interesting. And our final question, what do you know about the world of economics today that you wish you knew twenty five years ago when you were really first getting started. I wish I knew more about how policymakers think about policymakers who were not economists and who aren't at the FED or Treasure think about how to help people.

So I'm thinking about Congress now, and I wish I knew more about how they thought about the economy, because if I understood that then, and frankly, if I understood that now, maybe we could affect the way they're thinking so that we don't run into this other prolonged recession. And you know the danger here, Verry, is that inflation is a real worry that can actually happen. We haven't met our inflation targets for for almost a decade, only you know a handful of times in a decade. That

could be a real serious problem. So I would like to understand better how people who make a go policy think, and I wish I could influence it more because the American people, American households, businesses, need state, local governments, the art need a lot of help right now. Quite interesting. Thank you Lisa Cook for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Professor Lisa Cook. She teaches economics and international relations at the James Madison College at

Michigan State University. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out any of the other three hundred and fifty or so previous interviews we've had. You can find that at iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, a cast wherever Finder podcasts are sold. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You could check out my weekly columns on Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Sign up for our daily reads at

Ridolts dot tom. Be sure and follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. Give us a review at Apple iTunes. I would be remiss if I did not thank the Cracks staff that helps us put these conversations together each week. My audio engineer is Maroufal, Michael Batnick is my head of research, Attico val Brund is our project manager, Michael Boyle is our producer, and I'm Barry rid Halts. You've been listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg Radio.