It looks like Rachel Reeves has been caught copying someone else’s homework. The Financial Times reports this morning that it has found at least 20 instances of plagiarism in the Shadow Chancellor’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, with whole paragraphs ripped from other sources… including Wikipedia. This is a book which supposedly laments how women often don’t receive credit for their own work… 

The book’s publisher, Basic Books, have already thrown up their hands:

“When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. We acknowledge this did not happen in every case.”

Here’s just one example – try to spot the difference…

Reeves: “Keynes’s key argument was that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment from which the economy would not automatically rebound.”

Wikipedia: “He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and since wages and labour costs are rigid downwards the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment.”

A spokesperson for Reeves has already told the FT “these were inadvertent mistakes and will be rectified in future reprints“. The book only released this morning, and already they’re talking about reprints. Should make for an interesting Q&A session at her launch event tonight – the one Reeves had to rely on seat-filling services to bulk up the numbers…