Phil Magness picks Piketty apart. A slice:
Piketty’s empirical work suffers from several highly problematic characteristics. Empirical demonstrations of the century-long distributional U-shape for three different countries — his main piece of evidence for his inequality thesis — are rendered unreliable by issues including
- suspect and biased adjustment techniques,
- selective cherry-picking to create trends from ambiguous data sets, and
- grossly insufficient annotation to cross-check and replicate his results where they diverge from their claimed sources.
Taken together, these issues reflect a severe confirmation bias at play throughout Piketty’s analysis.
Speaking of income inequality, what’s happening to income inequality globally? Max Roser has a perspective.
Alberto Mingardi ponders Inca socialism.
Congratulations to EconLog’s David Henderson!
The fine AEI economist John Makin has died at the age of 71.
