The Financial Times Is Blowing Piketty's Data Issues Out Of Proportion, Part One

On Friday, the Financial Times published allegations by its economics editor Chris Giles that Thomas Piketty’s wealth inequality data in his heralded Capital in the Twenty-First Century gives a suspiciously skewed impression of trends and cross-national rankings. I will confess that I clicked on the link full of schadenfreude; I believe that Piketty’s book is irresponsibly speculative, that his inequality estimates sometimes give the wrong impression, and that his policy preferences would prove harmful to the middle class and poor in the long run.

However, I also believe that few researchers that achieve Piketty’s prominence fake their data, and I have deep respect for how readily Piketty and his colleagues have made vast quantities of data available online for anyone to see. For that matter, having read the book, I know that it cannot be reduced to the charts Giles criticized. And as someone who criticizes research and who is criticized, I have an interest in promoting the fair adjudication of research controversies.

This article originally appeared in Forbes on May 28, 2014.

Scott Winship is the Walter B. Wriston Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. You can follow him on Twitter here.