Thomas Piketty responds to the haters

Last week, Chris Giles of The Financial Times kicked up a storm in economic circles by claiming that Thomas Piketty had messed up the data in his landmark study Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a historical survey of income inequality in the capitalist world. Giles said Piketty had plucked numbers "out of thin air" and "got his sums wrong," undercutting his central thesis that economic inequality is rising in Europe and the United States.

Now Piketty has responded — and at length.

The gist is that Piketty is standing behind both his data and his conclusions. This comes on top of several economists and commentators suggesting that Giles exaggerated the implications of the errors and discrepancies he found in Piketty's spreadsheets.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

So if you were one of the many people who helped send Capital to the top of the bestseller lists, don't send it back to the publisher just yet.