CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

I reserve the right to be wrong...

Thomas Piketty caused quite a stir with the publication of his tome 'Capital in the 21st Century'. Chris Giles, writing in the Financial Times, finds fault with the data used by Piketty to proclaim a return to 1910 levels of income inequality. What kind of errors? .

Robert P. Murphy goes over exactly what's going on and shows the feebleness of the data that have come out of Piketty's analysis.

This is on top of the easy answer we Austrians had even back when we believed the data themselves. If inequality was as historically high as claimed then it was because of inflation brought on by central banks printing money and giving it to those financiers close to them. With government, proximity is everything.

So I'm in no hurry to pooh-pooh Piketty's data. It simply turned out to be wrong. As for what's right, I'll side with Bob Murphy again and wait and see. Certainly no grand challenge to freedom has been made here. Sorry Thomas.

Again, I reserve the right to be wrong...

Comments

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