Washington Post: "Piketty’s 'errors' aren’t mistakes: They’re questions, and he answered them"

Link to web site

"Thomas Piketty thinks the Financial Times knows nothing of his technical work.
[See various earlier posts on this Brent Cross Coalition web site, below.]

"That's the Cliff Notes version of his 4,400-word response to the criticisms the Financial Times leveled against the data in his best-selling book "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Piketty says that even though he expects people to improve on his work in the future, he still stands by it today, and the mistakes the Financial Times thinks it's found aren't actually mistakes — and that they'd know this if they'd read the appendices he put online.

"... Piketty, in contrast, only uses tax data to generate his British numbers. Now, that data isn't always the best-suited, but it's still better than raw survey results. And it's why Piketty finds that the top 10 percent hold 71 percent of the wealth in Britain, while the survey that Giles touts says it's just 44 percent.

"Ask yourself, as Piketty does, whether you think modern-day Britain is 'one of the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution.' That's what you'd have to believe if you take those survey results at face value."

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Link to Daily Telegraph Review
(10 May 2014)

"Former Bank of England Governer Mervyn King takes on the Left-wing French economist everybody's talking about"

"Piketty believes that there is a 'fundamental logical contradiction' in capitalism with 'potentially terrifying' consequences for wealth distribution unless we adopt radical policies to tax the rich. Because his is a book of great scope and ambition, one can see why it has attracted attention. 

"For all those people who would like to have a big idea but can’t think of one, Piketty has given hope that there is a fundamental weakness in capitalism. And after so many breathless accounts of the recent financial crisis, a wide-ranging historical analysis of the distribution of the fruits of economic growth is a pleasant surprise. A serious, thought-provoking book is to be welcomed.

"... Inequality does matter, and measures to reduce it have a proper place in economic policy. But by promoting efficiency and raising living standards, a market economy has proved its worth.

"To argue that inequality is the fundamental weakness of modern capitalism, while ignoring capitalism’s achievements, may excite the well-heeled intellectual salons of Paris and New York, but most of us recognise that a market economy has served us well by creating growth and reducing poverty."