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His dissertation, “The correctional carrot,” had a more applied bent. More than 35 years later, when giving an invited talk in Santiago, Chile, Cook learned economics departments in Latin America had been teaching his proof for decades. Over time, Cook’s solution not only made its way into U.S. It was, Frank said, “breathtakingly elegant.” Cook’s entire process is contained on page 139 of volume 62, 1972. In his characteristically succinct style, Cook declared “the usual proof … very tedious and non-intuitive.” His solution was the opposite. The proof became his first published paper in The American Economic Review. I figured out I could do this very quickly …” All of us who went through a PhD in economics at the time had suffered through these proofs, with lecturers at the blackboard for 30 minutes. I realized … when I do this particular manipulation, I can get this famous result in economics that typically requires pages and pages of proof. “I was a TA for a graduate course in theory and was preparing notes for my section. More evidence of Cook’s aptitude came when he produced “A One-line’ Proof of the Slutsky Equation.” The equation – a staple of economics textbooks – is used to demonstrate the individual consumer’s reaction to a change in the market price of a commodity by breaking down the change in demand into substitution effects and income effects, Cook explained.

He also had the “right stuff in terms of his family background - one of his older brothers was a pioneering figure in computer science.” In the daily rivalry among economics PhD students to show who could master the hard math, Cook was “a blue chip contestant,” Frank said. Frank, Cook’s lifelong friend and co-author on the landmark 1995 book, The Winner Take-All Society, remembers him attending Berkeley on a National Science Foundation Fellowship, a bonafide math whiz. Since the early days of his career, Cook has made a habit of asking questions others are not asking, and finding new ways to solve problems. He does that because he respects the scientific enterprise, but also because, in his line of work, people’s lives depend on getting the science right.” Early Career Questions At a festschrift in his honor, colleagues reflected on Cook’s “life of scholarship on bad behavior.” Bruce Kuniholm, Sanford’s first dean, called Cook the “intellectual godfather of the Sanford School.” This spring, Cook completed his final year of teaching, committee service, and administrative leadership and became one of the first emeritus professors of the school he helped create. Cook arrived at Duke in 1973 just as the university launched its program in the nascent field of public policy studies. The topics he studied drew him into politically charged debates, and at times, his email inbox was peppered with hate mail.ĭuring those four decades, Cook held several key leadership roles at Sanford, helping build the program from a small interdisciplinary unit to a school enrolling more than 700 students each year. His work produced entirely new ways to think about, and measure, society’s efforts to temper human excesses. Economic inequality and “winner-take-all” markets. During Philip Cook’s 44-year career at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, he has studied some of our nation’s most intractable problems.