Claudia Sahm stole the ''Sahm Rule'' from Bill Dudley. It should be called the "Dudley-Sahm Rule''.
''Claudia Sahm is the Elizabeth Holmes of economics. Media is desperate for a woman macroeconomist. Doesn't matter what the actual qualifications are.''
The ‘‘Sahm Rule’’ is in the news again.
The Sahm Rule identifies signals related to the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the national unemployment rate rises by 0.50 percentage points or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months.
It’s a simple recession indicator, ‘‘invented’’ by friend-of-the-blog Claudia Sahm.
You may remember her from this peculiar episode in which she went around advertising herself as the ‘‘Chief Economic Consultant of the Conservative Party of Canada’’.
A fabrication, as I unveiled.
She’s a far-left political operative who worked for John Podesta. It is wholly inconceivable that the Conservative Party of Canada would bestow upon her the title of ‘Chief Economic Consultant’.
As many political operatives do, she cloaks herself in a thin veneer of credentials, in this case, a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan.
Her career as an economist is built primarily upon the ‘‘Sahm Rule’’.
It’s featured front and center on her website:
In recent years, the Sahm Rule has been featured ad nauseam in the mainstream media, who constantly trip over themselves to fawn over it:
'Sahm Rule' enters Fed lexicon as fast, real-time recession flag (Reuters)
Claudia Sahm breaks down her recession indicator (Fox News)
Economist Claudia Sahm has a better way to handle recessions (MIT Sloan)
What the Jobs Report Says About the 'Sahm Rule' (Wall Street Journal)
.Claudia Sahm on what is driving inflation in America (The Economist)
The Sahm Rule is a huge deal in macroeconomics!
Which is weird. Because it’s not only trivial… but stolen.
Trivial, because the rule states: Unemployment rises in a recession.
To claim a revelation in stating the rise of unemployment during economic downturns is akin to announcing the arrival of rain during a storm.
Stolen, because it was first invented by economist Bill Dudley.
We know this because Claudia Sahm angrily tweeted out an email she received from Dudley, in which he politely points her toward the same rule that he came up with 20 years prior, in a Goldman Sachs research report:
Did Sahm fail to acknowledge a prior economist’s identical work, or was she simply unaware? The pursuit of truth demands transparency and proper attribution.
Upon being notified of this, she repeatedly called Dudley a ‘‘LOSER’’.
And then repeatedly played the gender card, making this issue of academic integrity about ‘‘men who refuse to acknowledge women’s expertise’’.
She then states that she chose to disregard Dudley and ‘‘own it’’ because ‘‘any man would.’’
The introduction of gender into this discourse is a distraction from the core issue of intellectual integrity. Did she create the "rule" or not? That is the question that demands an answer, free from emotional manipulation.
What she fails to realize is this has nothing to do with gender. If Justin Wolfers stole a rule, for example, and then spent years parading it around on the world stage, it would be just as egregious. This is a prime example of a weaponized victimhood complex.
She then appeared on the Mercatus Center podcast to further manipulate the narrative:
INTERVIEWER: To have a rule named after you is a pretty big feat, a pretty big accomplishment … You have a rule named after you. You've done it at a blazing pace … How did the name come about?
SAHM: Christy Romer, I was talking to her … I said, "Oh, the Sahm Rule," and she looked to me, and she's like, "Claudia, you have got to own this. Any man economist would own this," and I was like, "This is true. I've never heard John Taylor push back on the Taylor rule," so I've tried really hard.
…
So then, like, two or three weeks ago when it got more coverage, I think this was when the Wall Street Journal article came out, we were driving home in the car, and [my teenage daughter] looked at me, and she's like, "Mom, are you worried that you've peaked with the Sahm Rule?"
She then explains that her rule is different than Dudley’s because she uses a chart, and he uses a table.
Except… when you turn his table into a chart… it turns into her chart.
Dudley's table laid the foundation, Sahm's chart merely decorates/visualizes it.
SAHM: And I actually got an email from Bill Dudley like a week or two ago. And the subject line of the email was, for what it's worth, here's my three-tenths rule I put it in a Goldman Sachs newsletter in 2000, 2001 and he did a little screenshot of the Goldman thing, highlighted the sentence, he'd written and then there was a table. A table, not a chart of like how it worked in [mine]. I didn't reply to him.
If she was academically honest she would say:
"Oh look bill dudley came up with something earlier I wasn't aware of, I'll note that in my work".
— EJMR comment
Here she says that she ‘‘couldn’t believe that a man cared enough’’ about the naming of her rule to send her an email.
Well, which is it?
Does she see the "rule" as a trivial matter, or a stolen treasure?
She makes so much noise about this one intellectual contribution, and now that it turns out to be as unoriginal as it was uninteresting, she's saying "who cares that I didn't discover it, name it after me anyway". Pick a side lmao.
— EJMR comment
Why does the name of this rule matter?
Well, it doesn’t, really.
It’s academics fighting over table scraps as usual.
Except she loudly built her entire career on these stolen table scraps, and is now playing the gendered victim.
Here is where you will quote Stigler’s law of eponomy to me, which states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
However, Stigler’s law exists for concepts that have been cemented in scientific lingo only after being used for decades/centuries. The Wikipedia page for the Sahm Rule is a mere 4 years old, and will exist for decades/centuries, so it’s not too late to rename this the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’.
If you are a Wikipedia user, please make the edit:
With respect to Stigler's Law, I think there is also a concept of Jury Nullification. We are the jury as a community and as such can nullify this naming convention for a more apt description. So as a community we can just refer to it as the Dudley-Sahm Rule.
— EJMR comment
Possible that 2 people both made the same observation independently? Still wouldn't merit calling it by 2nd person's name, but would be more charitable than saying 2nd copied the first.
— EJMR comment
She was NOT the first one to lay the groundwork on the underlying economics/research, yet is the SOLE name on it? I think its fair to at least "split the check" on naming rights.
— EJMR comment
In fact, in 2022, the Wikipedia page for the ‘‘Sahm Rule’’ used to have a caveat stating that it should be called the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm rule’’, or at least that there was controversy over the naming, but this caveat was deleted because ‘‘mostly non-economists who are politically opposed to Claudia Sahm’s discussions of women’s role in economics and therefore … [is] misleading information.’’
Except… it’s not ‘‘mostly non-economists’’ who use the correct ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’ terminology.
Michael Feroli is Chief US Economist at J. P. Morgan.
He referred to it as simply the ‘‘Dudley Rule’’ in a 2022 report, and was viciously dragged and shamed on Twitter for it.
That was the last time anyone high-profile referred to it as the Dudley Rule.
It’s simply not worth the fight for serious economists to be intellectually honest about this, because the feminist mob will jump on them.
A woman invented the Sahm rule. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?
Why is the Dudley-Sahm Rule in the news?
I began this article by saying that the ‘The ‘Sahm Rule’ is in the news again.’’
That’s because the recession rule is currently triggering across 20+ states, including big ones like New York and California.
She now says the rule doesn’t apply to states, only on a national level.
Yesterday, she wrote a Bloomberg article defending her arbitrary usage of the rule:
What this reveals is that Claudia Sahm is a partisan hack.
I am 100% sure that if Trump were president she would be arguing that it applies at a state level.
Serious economists and journalists should refer to it as the ‘‘Dudley-Sahm Rule’’ moving forward.
Stigler's Law of Eponymy (of which I had never heard, grateful to you!) is going in my little container of treasures, alongside J.B.S Haldane's description of the steps of scientific advance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so."
Money well spent in this substack!