Piketty Facts

Most Piketty commentary (like the Deridre McCloskey review I blogged earlier) focuses on the theory , r>g , together with and so on. After all , that's slow together with y'all don't bring to read hundreds of pages.

"Challenging the Empirical Contribution of Thomas Piketty's Capital inwards the 21st Century" by Phillip W. Magness and Robert P. Murphy is i of the showtime deep reviews of the facts that I bring seen. I haven't read it soundless , simply the abstract looks promising:

Thomas Piketty's Capital inwards the 21st Century has been widely debated on theoretical grounds , soundless continues to attract acclaim for its historically-infused information analysis. In this written report nosotros behave a closer scrutiny of Piketty's empirics than has appeared hence far , focusing upon his handling of the United States. We detect bear witness of pervasive errors of historical fact , opaque methodological choices , together with the cherry-picking of sources to ready favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional bear witness suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive information supposition from the Soviet Union to accentuate i of his master copy historical claims almost global “capitalism” inwards the 20th century. Taken together , these problems propose that Piketty’s highly praised together with historically-driven empirical travel may genuinely live on the book’s greatest weakness.

Comments on the newspaper welcome. If I expire a peril to read it I'll post some.