Financial Times headline: 'Piketty findings undercut by errors' (with response)
Source: Financial Times
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.
Read more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html
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Piketty's response:
http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2014/05/23/piketty-response-to-ft-data-concerns/
... For instance, my US series have already been extended and improved by an important new research paper by Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman (LSE). This work was done after my book was written, so unfortunately I could not use it for my book. Saez and Zucman use much more systematic data than I used in my book, especially for the recent period. Also their series are constructed using a completely different data source and methodology (namely, the capitalisation method using capital income flows and income statements by asset class). The main results are available here: http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf.
As you can see by yourself, their results confirm and reinforce my own findings: the rise in top wealth shares in the US in recent decades has been even larger than what I show in my book.
... Finally, let me say that my estimates on wealth concentration do not fully take into account offshore wealth, and are likely to err on the low side.
= new reply since forum marked as read
They should be stripped of their credibility. Can we do that? 
Off with their heads.
We live in an America where Piketty is wrong,
but Benghazi is REAL?
It's not just that America doesn't believe in reality,
Reality no longer believes in America.
