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Comment by QuantumChaos | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, Krugman, Summers, and other economists praise Piketty primarily for his unique, groundbreaking empirical work on income inequality.

On the other hand, when FT critique his empirical work, Piketty says that his work has already been superceded by other work that proves income inequality is growing. So nothing the FT can say about Piketty's work will overturn this now well established fact.

So which is it? I'm inclined to go with the former, because those economists focused on Piketty's empirical work and downplayed his theoretical work and policy suggestions. And my own knowledge of economics informs me that detailed empirical work of this sort is not done enough. So I think that while Piketty might consider the empirical part of his book to be a detail, in fact it is a very important matter. All that remains is how valid FT's criticism is, and how much it changes the results.

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The FT is pretty open in it's questioning of the data - http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/23/data-problems-wi...

Rather than accuse them of dishonesty surely all Piketty has to do is explain where their analysis is wrong?

He and others (including critics of his work) have, as far as I can tell?

> While the available data was "imperfect", it did not undermine his central argument about widening inequality, he said. "Where the Financial Times is being dishonest is to suggest that this changes things in the conclusions I make, when in fact it changes nothing. More recent studies only support my conclusions, by using different sources."

> Scott Winship, an economist at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and notable critic of Piketty's analysis, said the FT's allegations weren't "significant for the fundamental question of whether Piketty's thesis is right or not". In an email to Bloomberg news agency, he wrote: "It's hard to think Piketty did something unethical when he put it up there for people like me to delve into his figures and find something that looks sketchy … Piketty has been as good or better than anyone at both making all his data available and documenting what he does generally."

The first quote is exactly the kind of vagueness that could be avoided by specifically addressing what the FT said, which other studies support his conclusions, etc.

The second quote is similarly vague, and the part on ethics is irrelevant.

Could you clarify what you mean with "specifically addressing"?

He did cite the study (Saez/Zucman). The article probably omitted the specific reference.

To quote from the Economist article about this yesterday:

> There are four important questions raised by the FT's work. First, which data are wrong? ...

> "Capital" is a sprawling book based on an enormous pile of reference material and data. Much of the data was collected by Mr Piketty and other economists in a series of published papers that have since been used to create the World Top Incomes Database. None of this work appears to be at issue. Rather, Mr Giles focuses on wealth inequality, to which Mr Piketty turns in Chapter 10 of his book. Mr Piketty has not published nearly as much research on the question of wealth inequality, and it seems that much of the analysis in Chapter 10 was done specifically for the book, based on others' research. Mr Piketty's wealth-inequality analysis certainly matters as a component of the book's argument, but it is not accurate to say, as Mr Giles does, that the results in Chapter 10 constitute the "central theme" of the book.

So your two proposition are not contradictory. Piketty's principle historical work was published before the book, in peer-reviewed journals, and that is different from the analysis which is being criticized.

Why can't it be both? You might have a question as to why Piketty gets so much credit, but the two are not mutually exclusive.

You are right, this is possible. But I am assuming that the Krugman, Summers and other reviewers (at least somewhat) did their homework, and were correct in saying that Piketty's empirical work was unique and important.

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