Oopsie - not quite as advertised - Thomas Piketty and his book

From [Financial Times](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32Z08Ouqt): > **Piketty findings undercut by errors**
Thomas Piketty’s book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, has been the publishing sensation of the year. Its thesis of rising inequality tapped into the zeitgeist and electrified the post-financial crisis public policy debate. > > But, according to a Financial Times investigation, the rock-star French economist appears to have got his sums wrong. > > 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. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. > > The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few. > > Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, 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. > > For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns. > Heh -- shades of [Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America). The author -- Michael A. Bellesiles -- was highly praised because the conclusions in his book fit into the academic political worldview so well. It won the Bancroft Prize. Only later when people started digging did the errors surface. The Bancroft Prize was [recinded](http://hnn.us/article/1157), Bellesiles resigned his professorship at Emory Wonder how long it will take for Piketty to go down in flames...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on May 23, 2014 2:05 PM.

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