Piketty's Empirics Are as Bad as His Theory

In my earlier Piketty post, I wrote, "If much of its "reasoning" is little more than neo-Marxist drivel, much of its underlying measurement is nevertheless marvelous." The next day, recognizing the general possibility of a Reinhart-Rogoff error, but with no suspicion that that anything was actually remiss, I added "(assuming of course that it's trustworthy)."

Perhaps I really should read some newspapers. Thanks to Boragan Aruoba for noting this, and for educating me. Turns out that the Financial Times -- clearly a centrist publication with no ax to grind -- got hold of Piketty's data (underlying source data, constructed series, etc.) and published a scathing May 23 indictment.

The chart above -- just one example -- is from The Economist, reporting on the FT piece. Somehow Piketty managed to fit the dark blue curves to the light blue dots of source data. Huh? Sure looks like he conveniently ignored a boatload of recent data that happen to work against him. Put differently, his fits appear much more revealing of his sharp prior view than of data-based information. Evidently he forgot to talk about that in his book.

In my view, Reinhart-Rogoff was a one-off and innocent (if unfortunate) mistake, whereas the FT analysis clearly suggests that Piketty's "mistakes," in contrast, are systematic and egregious.