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 tardily together with y'all don't accept 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 1 of the showtime deep reviews of the facts that I accept seen. I haven't read it yet, simply the abstract looks promising:

Thomas Piketty's Capital inwards the 21st Century has been widely debated on theoretical grounds, even together with so continues to attract acclaim for its historically-infused information analysis. In this report nosotros acquit a closer scrutiny of Piketty's empirics than has appeared hence far, focusing upon his handling of the United States. We detect prove of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, together with the cherry-picking of sources to laid upwards favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional prove suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive information supposition from the Soviet Union to accentuate 1 of his primary historical claims nigh global “capitalism” inwards the 20th century. Taken together, these problems advise that Piketty’s highly praised together with historically-driven empirical travel may genuinely last the book’s greatest weakness.

Comments on the newspaper welcome. If I kicking the bucket a jeopardy to read it I'll postal service some.