Lisa Cook, the Fed governor Donald Trump is trying to fire

WHAT IS THE cost of discrimination? Lisa Cook, the first black woman (and only second black person) to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, has built a career on finding empirical answers to that question. More than a century since Sadie Alexander became the first black American woman to earn a PhD in economics, a large majority of economists are still white men. Black people make up 14% of America’s population, but gained less than 5% of economics degrees in 2023—a share that has shrunk since the mid-1990s, according to the American Economic Association, a professional body. “If economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to black women,” Ms Cook wrote in an essay in 2019.