‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, is on the tip of everyone’s lips and that has author Thomas Piketty on the tip of everyone’s knives.
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.
…
In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas
The larger takedown appears here.
Wealth concentration among the richest people has been pretty stable for 50 years in both Europe and the US.
There is no obvious upward trend. The conclusions of Capital in the 21st century do not appear to be backed by the book’s own sources.