excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
- 18,082
- 34,217
- 2,290
The lies the leftoids keep pushing. At least there are a few people who push back.
Besides being a black woman at a time when the Biden administration is publicly committed to appointing a disproportionate number of black women, economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors. Her work raises one of the more troubling issues in political philosophy.
...
Cook spent several years carefully coming up with a list of 726 patents granted to black inventors over the 71 years of a golden age of American invention from 1870 to 1940, or 10.2 patents per year. Considering that most African-Americans were legally enslaved up until 1865, each one was an impressive accomplishment. Yet, in the extraordinarily inventive Thomas Edison Era when Americans were averaging over 25,000 patents per year, ten is not a big number.
In contrast, a 2020 paper by Michael J. Andrews and Jonathan T. Rothwell came up with an estimate of blacks garnering 49,821 patents over the same years, 69 times more than Cook’s count of 726. Either Cook or Andrews & Rothwell must be wrong. Likely both are off by a considerable amount, with the real number in between.
...
Cook’s source for 65 percent of her listings was Henry E. Baker (1857–1928), an African-American examiner in the United States Patent Office. Baker helped conduct sizable federal mail surveys in 1900 and 1913 of patent attorneys and other experts asking for the names of black inventors to honor. Baker then checked the responses against the files.
He ultimately published the claim that he’d verified 821 patents issued to blacks, with 505 leads left to follow up. Baker also asserted that his list probably comprised only half of all black patents. And given another 27 years from 1913 to 1940, all in all, it seems not implausible that blacks might have earned several thousand patents during these 71 years rather than just Cook’s list of 726 trustworthy ones.
On the other hand, whatever the exact real number, the black contribution over that fecund time period was less than staggering. Americans in total earned 1,893,200 utility patents, or 26,665 per year.
...
When you do what Cook did, readers will often just plain get it wrong. For example, Cook’s NPR interviewer looked at her graph and then told the public:
No, they didn’t. If you stare at the graph long enough, you’ll figure out that Cook’s graph is actually saying that in their best year in her database, 1899, blacks earned patents about 1/550th as often as whites per capita.
...
So, if we take Baker at his word, then, contra Cook, black inventors were about as productive in the early 20th century as they were in the late 19th century. And that’s about what you’d expect: Democrats were trying to make life worse for blacks, but blacks were working to make themselves better.
But that things mostly kept on keeping on isn’t a very interesting finding to publish.
Does that mean Cook deliberately misled her readers? Probably not. She doesn’t seem that clever. As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Despite the Theory of Intersectionality that the Biden administration subscribes to so whole-heartedly in making their nominations, much the same is true for a black woman.
www.takimag.com
Besides being a black woman at a time when the Biden administration is publicly committed to appointing a disproportionate number of black women, economist Lisa D. Cook’s prime qualification for her nomination to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve is a celebrated paper on black inventors. Her work raises one of the more troubling issues in political philosophy.
...
Cook spent several years carefully coming up with a list of 726 patents granted to black inventors over the 71 years of a golden age of American invention from 1870 to 1940, or 10.2 patents per year. Considering that most African-Americans were legally enslaved up until 1865, each one was an impressive accomplishment. Yet, in the extraordinarily inventive Thomas Edison Era when Americans were averaging over 25,000 patents per year, ten is not a big number.
In contrast, a 2020 paper by Michael J. Andrews and Jonathan T. Rothwell came up with an estimate of blacks garnering 49,821 patents over the same years, 69 times more than Cook’s count of 726. Either Cook or Andrews & Rothwell must be wrong. Likely both are off by a considerable amount, with the real number in between.
...
Cook’s source for 65 percent of her listings was Henry E. Baker (1857–1928), an African-American examiner in the United States Patent Office. Baker helped conduct sizable federal mail surveys in 1900 and 1913 of patent attorneys and other experts asking for the names of black inventors to honor. Baker then checked the responses against the files.
He ultimately published the claim that he’d verified 821 patents issued to blacks, with 505 leads left to follow up. Baker also asserted that his list probably comprised only half of all black patents. And given another 27 years from 1913 to 1940, all in all, it seems not implausible that blacks might have earned several thousand patents during these 71 years rather than just Cook’s list of 726 trustworthy ones.
On the other hand, whatever the exact real number, the black contribution over that fecund time period was less than staggering. Americans in total earned 1,893,200 utility patents, or 26,665 per year.
...
When you do what Cook did, readers will often just plain get it wrong. For example, Cook’s NPR interviewer looked at her graph and then told the public:
No, they didn’t. If you stare at the graph long enough, you’ll figure out that Cook’s graph is actually saying that in their best year in her database, 1899, blacks earned patents about 1/550th as often as whites per capita.
...
So, if we take Baker at his word, then, contra Cook, black inventors were about as productive in the early 20th century as they were in the late 19th century. And that’s about what you’d expect: Democrats were trying to make life worse for blacks, but blacks were working to make themselves better.
But that things mostly kept on keeping on isn’t a very interesting finding to publish.
Does that mean Cook deliberately misled her readers? Probably not. She doesn’t seem that clever. As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Despite the Theory of Intersectionality that the Biden administration subscribes to so whole-heartedly in making their nominations, much the same is true for a black woman.
