Should-Read: The truly remarkable thing is that Kevin Has...

Should-Read: The truly remarkable thing is that Kevin Hassett's explanation for why he passed off Susan Dynarski and Judith Scott-Clayton's ideas as his own was that he thought he was just appropriating the good ideas of his American Enterprise Institute RA. Worse than you can imagine, even when you already know that it is worse than you can imagine: Noah Smith: "Everyone in the econ world (or the politics world, really) should read this thread about Kevin Hassett: "@dynarski 'Is now a good time to talk about how Kevin Hassett stole the intellectual property of an untenured Harvard professor & her grad student?'...

...@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

@delong was right and I was wrong.

Susan Dynarski: Prof Dynarski on Twitter: "In related news, Kevin Hassett has lost claim to being a serious economist...

...Is now a good time to talk about how Kevin Hassett stole the intellectual property of an untenured Harvard professor & her grad student?

In Feb 2007 Kevin Hassett published this WSJ column about his terrific, evidence-based idea to streamline the student aid system. The ideas and evidence in this column are commonplace now. But they were new in 2007.

I released this paper, co-authored with a grad student, 9 months earlier. And in February 2007 we released a policy proposal through the Hamilton Project. I contacted Hassett at the time and he said "Oops, RA failed to note your authorship of these ideas." A few months later he did write a small piece in National Review praising our work. With attribution.

That's it. No big deal to him to steal our work but it was a big deal for me as a young scholar.

Hassett's National Review article about our work, published two months after the plagiarized Wall Street Journal piece, was effusively nice. But a correction in the Wall Street Journal was clearly in order. He didn't do the right thing.