Economist Piketty's Work Doesn't Add Up, 'Financial Times' Says

NPR ^ | May 23, 2014 | Marilyn Geewax

[nickcarraway]

French economist Thomas Piketty became a publishing superstar this year by putting two and two together and concluding that the rich are getting richer.

His best-seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, uses mountains of data to calculate Western wealth over the past two centuries. He says the historical statistics, drawn from many sources, show unrestrained capitalism inevitably leads to immense income inequality.

But on Friday, The Financial Times, a respected British newspaper, said it has reviewed the book's data. And it finds Piketty "got his sums wrong."

Chris Giles, the newspaper's economics editor in London, writes: "The data underpinning Professor Piketty's 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. ... There are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source."

And the story quotes Piketty's response: "I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future ... but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements," Piketty said.

And with that, we launch a thousand Ph.D. dissertations as young economists scramble to sort out who is right about the data's accuracy and import.

[mylife]

Rush Limbaugh has been all over this clown, Piketty.

[wideawake]

In order for wealth to be permanently concentrated, those who hold it must have the ability to flawlessly reinvest it in perpetuity.

[rdcbn]

The world as as Thomas Piketty would like it to be.

The guy just made things up as he went and all the Lefties hailed him as a genius, including President Obama , to whom Thomas Piketty was an influential adviser.

[Principled]

There are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source."

It's settled science. Consensus and all....

[facedown]

Reminds me of Bellesiles on gun ownership in early America. Everything from “transcription errors” to outright fabrication.

[Ken522]

Looks like ‘perfesser Piketty didn’t do too well on his undergraduate and graduate econometrics courses -

[Tzimisce]

But we at NPR know better.

[ncfool]

Sounds like he learned how to lie from Obama.