Even though it wouldn't have made sense, I expected the OP to go to this.
The general opinion on the twitters today seems to be "R.I.P. FT," thanks to Piketty's own relatively spectacular (PDF) self-vindication.
It doesn't matter that the accusations don't stand up to rigorous analysis, all that matters is that they have been made. That's enough to discredit him in the eyes of people who have an interest in having him discredited. People like that don't really give a shit about rigor anyway.
3: don't you talk bad about Ma/rc Andre/esen!
3 - I'd bet a dollar that McMegan uncritically repeats the Financial Times' claims about Piketty massaging the data.
Here's an example of it being repeated uncritically just a couple days ago. By a winner of the Hayek prize, no less.
We didn't expect Piketty to win over libertarian partisans. We expected him to have an effect on people in the middle. And the fact that the other side is talking about him means he is more likely to have that effect.
Halford in the first Piketty thread pointed out that Piketty is to the left of DeLong and Krugman. Those are the kind of guys I hope this will move.
I can't speak to DeLong, but is Krugman not far enough on the left?
I don't think the problem is the Krugmans not being left enough, its that there just aren't very many of them.
By a winner of the Hayek prize, no less.
If that prize isn't called "The Rod of Serfdom", libertarians are horrible people.
The French have no word for "Grauniad."
"The Rod of Serfdom"
Are libertarians generally sufficiently atheistic for "The Rood of Serfdom" to be a decent joke?
(I have no idea; I just like the word "rood.")
If that prize isn't called "The Rod of Serfdom", libertarians are horrible people.
The winner of the prize gets 1000 serfs.
7.b - Krugman said that the FT critique was self-refuting last week.
Yglesias covers this at Vox. Nothing all that interesting about the content, but his post does incorporate a numbered list of points where the numbering goes 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. I wonder if he does all his own formatting.
I heard this credulous interview with Giles on NPR from which I concluded that Giles is totally disingenuous.
Libertarians are horrible people in any case. #AllLibertarians
Halford in the first Piketty thread pointed out that Piketty is to the left of DeLong and Krugman. Those are the kind of guys I hope this will move.
I'm not going to be able to find the post but DeLong commented, about a month ago, that Piketty had shifted his (Delong's) predictions for the future, and that he know gave a much higher probability to the future Piketty describes than he would have before reading the book.
I hope someone updated the McMegan failing upward chart. She must be qualified to referee this disagreement, look how many other prominent places have featured her business writing! When she becomes a member of some high level economic advisory council under a Republican president, I'm going to shoot myself.
An academic library that I can still access online as an alum appears to have just gotten access to an ebook version of Piketty. At least, I didn't see it in the catalog when I checked before the reading group started. It's an interface I don't particular like - in the world of academic ebooks, what isn't? - but maybe I'll be able to catch up.
20: At the point we're at, it wouldn't be that hard to catch up.
Krugman and DeLong have both said the FT criticisms are basically unimportant. So has the Economist, which is traditionally to the right of the FT.
The biggest change in the charts that FT had was in England and it was apparently done by switching the source of the data. The article is looking like bullshit.
"Also note that a 44% wealth share for the top 10% (and a 12.5% wealth share for the top 1%, according to the FT) would mean that Britain is currently one the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution; in particular this would mean that Britain is a lot more equal that Sweden, and in fact a lot more equal than what Sweden as ever been (including in the 1980s). This does not look particularly plausible."
This Piketty guy is pretty awesome. Not that it's shocking that his entire academic career isn't completely destroyed by a journalist who spent a couple days looking at the data.
||
An article in support of an idea that has been talked about on the blog -- that housing the homeless is cheaper than leaving them homeless (even in a warm weather city).
Living on the streets isn't cheap: Each chronically homeless person in Central Florida costs the community roughly $31,000 a year, a new analysis being released Thursday shows.
The price tag covers the salaries of law-enforcement officers to arrest and transport homeless individuals -- largely for nonviolent offenses such as trespassing, public intoxication or sleeping in parks -- as well as the cost of jail stays, emergency-room visits and hospitalization for medical and psychiatric issues.
In contrast, providing the chronically homeless with permanent housing and case managers to supervise them would run about $10,000 per person per year, saving taxpayers millions of dollars during the next decade, the report concludes.
The findings are part of an independent economic-impact analysis that will be discussed Thursday afternoon by the Central Florida Commission on Homelessness.
"The numbers are stunning," said the homeless commission's CEO, Andrae Bailey. "Our community will spend nearly half a billion dollars [on the chronically homeless], and at the end of the decade, these people will still be homeless. It doesn't make moral sense, and now we know it doesn't make financial sense."
|>
19: I get to defend McMegan!
1. McMegan's Bloomberg piece on Piketty is actually pretty reasonable, by the standards of American journalism. If it didn't have her name on it, I wouldn't have thought twice on its mediocrity.
2. McMegan would be in the midrange, no worse, of Republican economic types. We're talking about a group whose top echelon consists of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard and Greg Mankiw.
25: Indeed, the spread of the Housing First concept has led to plummeting homelessness rates nationwide.
I dunno. I don't think its surprising that the big P is vindicated, because the data seems to be more of a collaboration across multiple academics and institutions over many years and papers, and when it's presented in as open a way as here, that makes it much harder for casual errors to come in.
I understand the reaction that this was pure rhetorical chaff, but I wonder if that's one factor in something more complex. The FT definitely comes with an ideological agenda, and an institutional culture, and two key ingredients of that are comfort with corporate finance, data literacy, and a certain broadsheet assumption of threshold competency from its readership.
So I can imagine Chris Giles or whoever saying "go take a deep dive into Piketty's data and see if there's anything weird", not just from some desire to help Team Money but with the knowledge that he and his staff can wrangle economic data without immediately shooting themselves in the foot.
Now, once they'd found discrepancies ... for which I think the question and explanation was useful ... How do you respond to that editorially knowing that Piketty is hot news? You're a newspaper not an econ department, maybe you should treat it as news and hype the headline as an exclusive? Especially since it seems to confirm there isn't such a wealth gap anyway, phew that's a relief.
The core debate across the FT / guardian / Piketty was all very quanty though, all assumptions at ten paces. That to me is an amazingly positive trend vs the way politics has been reported on my entire lifetime.
The climate change comparison is interesting because the data there was not so openly published, leaving them too open to speciously plausible crackpot "debunking". Isn't that basically what triggered the whole Berkeley earth project thing?
TLDR at least we are arguing about graphs now.
You're giving much to credit to Giles. In the interview I linked in 15 he isn't raising questions; Giles claims Piketty changed data because he didn't like the numbers, and that he made up the recent British wealth inequality data.
The FT literally headlined that he "pulled data out of thin air". I will never take the paper so seriously again.
31: the FT's weirder side is on open display in its (retroactively edited) Alphaville blog. There's a lot of good stuff there (esp. from Izzy Kaminska) but there is also a relatively high frequency of quite startlingly in-the-tank stuff, some of which disappears down the memory hole. And in the print version there's Clive Crook.
"Pulled data out of thin air" should go down in journalism training as how not to headline a fight over data with a team of people who have spent large chunks of their career on it, yes, but that's also part of the vibe I'm getting, that these are the old media habits being unlearnt on the way to a future of partisan data niggling.
Yeah look the more I write the more I sound like Polyanna but is no one else getting a little zephyr of empirical journalism zeitgeist from this?
Now that I've looked at the table of contents, Piketty's book is a lot longer than I expected. I saw the page count listed in reviews but thought maybe that meant a lot of endnotes. I guess I might really catch up, since one chapter/week means months.