Piketty and others (including the Economist) have come out defending his work from the barrage of criticism from FT. Things may get ugly.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/26/thomas-piketty-financial-times-dishonest-criticism-economics-book-inequality
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/may/26/thomas-piketty-financial-times-dishonest-criticism-economics-book-inequality
This book will definitely lead to intense debates for the next few years as other economists look into Piketty's data or gather their own data to see whether they arrive at the same conclusion as Piketty. I will be looking forward to the next few studies that come out. My predictions are that the next few studies will completely reject Piketty's conclusions or argue that the problem is less severe than Piketty believes.
ReplyDeleteJust another side of the story: all this debate and all the controversy will help boost the sales for this book!!! If it leads to good debate, keep the fire and more information coming.
ReplyDeleteThis is the best assessment of the Piketty controversy I've seen, and it doesn't even dig into the data itself:
ReplyDeletehttp://fivethirtyeight.com/features/be-skeptical-of-both-piketty-and-his-skeptics/
I'm interested to see what other big name economists are going to publicly chime in on the debate. I did not know that Krugman had already voiced his support for Piketty. In general, even before this book was published, income inequality was already pretty prominent in the public arena. I cannot recall any source that argues against the rise in income inequality. People may say that it has not increased as much as the media says it has, but that is different than saying it has not increased at all (and certainly not decreased). Tyler, I would be very surprised if a few studies could "completely reject Piketty's conclusions." If anybody attempts to do that, I would expect another book at least the size of this one for starters.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sanjay, I think it would be hard to completely reject Piketty's conclusions. To me, there seems to be a lot of merit to his arguments and any opposing viewpoints would have recognize a least a few of his contributions as credible.
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