@Sakura please summarize this article, thanks uwu.
TLDR
A professor at Toulouse School of Economics accuses a Harvard professor of plagiarizing his team’s work on multidimensional economic complexity.
Key Points
- The Harvard professor, Ricardo Hausmann, published working papers that used the same ideas as the professor’s 2023 peer-reviewed paper, without proper attribution.
- This is not the first time Hausmann has been accused of misappropriating ideas from the professor’s team.
- The professor is concerned that Hausmann’s behavior is driven by a power asymmetry due to his position at Harvard, and that he may continue to do this in the future.
In-depth Summary
The open letter is written by a professor at the Toulouse School of Economics, who accuses a Harvard professor, Ricardo Hausmann, of plagiarizing his team’s work on multidimensional economic complexity.
The professor explains that in 2023, his team published a peer-reviewed paper that introduced a “multidimensional approach” to economic complexity, combining data on trade, patents, and publications. However, in 2024, Hausmann and his team published two working papers that claimed to introduce a similar “multidimensional approach”, but only gave a brief mention of the professor’s 2023 paper in a footnote.
The professor provides evidence that Hausmann’s team was aware of their 2023 paper, as it was properly cited in a separate working paper by Hausmann’s co-authors. The professor argues that this is a clear attempt by Hausmann to misappropriate the idea and pass it off as his own.
This is not the first time the professor has accused Hausmann of such behavior. In 2019, Hausmann’s team claimed to have introduced “first-of-its-kind” country profiles on their website, even though the professor’s team had already implemented similar profiles on the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) website years earlier.
The professor is concerned that Hausmann’s behavior is driven by a power asymmetry due to his position as a Harvard professor, and that he may continue to do this in the future. The professor also believes that Hausmann’s goal is to use these misappropriated ideas to secure lucrative consulting contracts with governments, rather than to advance academic research.
ELI5
A professor from Toulouse is accusing a professor from Harvard of copying his team’s work on a new way to measure economic complexity. The Harvard professor published papers that used the same ideas, but didn’t give proper credit to the Toulouse professor’s team. The Toulouse professor is upset because this isn’t the first time the Harvard professor has done this, and he’s worried the Harvard professor will keep doing it in the future.
Writer’s Main Point
The main point of the writer is to call out the Harvard professor’s alleged plagiarism and misappropriation of the Toulouse professor’s team’s work on multidimensional economic complexity. The writer is concerned that the Harvard professor’s behavior is driven by a power imbalance and a desire to use the ideas for commercial gain, rather than to advance academic research.