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Thomas Piketty: Attack On My Work Is 'Just Ridiculous'


Economist and author Thomas Piketty speaks to the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley on April 23, 2014, in Berkeley, Calif. Economist author Thomas Piketty gave a lecture about his best-selling book titled "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" at UC Berkeley's Department of Economics.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

by Emily Cohn
Posted: 05/26/2014 12:02 pm EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

A recent analysis alleging that Thomas Piketty's groundbreaking data on inequality contains errors is "just ridiculous," according to the French economist.

In an email to Bloomberg News [ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-26/piketty-rejects-ridiculous-allegations-of-data-flaws.html ], Piketty dismissed a report published Friday in the Financial Times alleging that his book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century [ http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X ], contains "many unexplained data entries and errors in the figures underlying some of the book’s key charts." The book has surged in popularity [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/22/thomas-piketty-amazon_n_5191566.html ] and sparked new conversations on inequality on a global scale.

"There’s no mistake or error,” Piketty wrote to Bloomberg News. Piketty earlier defended his work [ http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/23/piketty-response-to-ft-data-concerns/ ] in a blog post that ran on the Financial Times' website.

The Financial Times' report by Chris Giles [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz32YyNFg5K ], which alleged that some of the conclusions Piketty makes aren't supported by the data provided in the book, has come under a lot of scrutiny since it was published.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman questioned Giles' analysis [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/is-piketty-all-wrong/ ] in a blog post published in The New York Times on Saturday.

"The point is that Giles is proving too much," Krugman wrote. "Anyone imagining that the whole notion of rising wealth inequality has been refuted is almost surely going to be disappointed."

Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also came to Piketty's defense [ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/upshot/a-new-critique-of-piketty-has-its-own-shortcomings.html ] in a blog post on the Times' The Upshot.

"The Financial Times analysis is definitely provocative," Wolfers wrote. "While it raises important questions, I’m not convinced it does more than that."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/26/piketty-financial-times-attack_n_5393069.html [with comments]

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