Transformado em “superstar” da economia após a publicação de seu estudo sobre o aumento da desigualdade, “Capital no século 21″, o economista francês Thomas Piketty está na berlinda. Uma reportagem do “Financial Times” aponta que a tese de 577 páginas de Piketty contém “uma série de erros que afeta suas descobertas”.
O “FT” afirma ter descoberto no trabalho do francês “erros e dados inexplicados em suas planilhas, similares às que enfraqueceram o trabalho sobre dívida pública e crescimento de Carmen Reinhart Kenneth e do ex-secretário de Tesouro americano Kenneth Rogoff”.
O argumento fundamental do livro de Piketty, que tem estado no topo das listas de best-sellers, é de que a imensa maioria da riqueza mundial está nas mãos de poucos e que desigualdade mundial voltou aos níveis encontrados antes da Primeira Guerra.
“O professor Piketty fornece fontes detalhadas para suas estimativas da desigualdade de riqueza na Europa e nos EUA nos últimos 200 anos. Em suas planilhas, no entanto, há erros de transcrição das fontes originais e fórmulas incorretas. Também parece que alguns dados foram escolhidos cuidadosamente ou construídos sem uma fonte original”, diz o “Financial Times”.
— Não tenho dúvidas de que minha série histórica de dados pode ser aprimorada e vai ser aprimorada no futuro… mas eu ficaria bastante surpreso de qualquer conclusão substantiva sobre a evolução no longo prazo da distribuição de riqueza fosse muito afetada por estes aprimoramentos — rebateu Piketty ao “FT”.
===========
Transcrição da matéria completa do FT, no original, com vídeo, neste link:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fglobal-economy%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz32pMOSbYr
===========
Transcrição da matéria completa do FT, no original, com vídeo, neste link:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e1f343ca-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fglobal-economy%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct#axzz32pMOSbYr
Piketty findings undercut by errors
©Getty
Thomas Piketty’s book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, has been the publishing sensation of the year. Its thesis of rising inequality tapped into the zeitgeist and electrified the post-financial crisis public policy debate.
Chris Giles outlines his issues with data in ‘Capital in the 21st Century’
Some issues concern sourcing and definitional problems. Some numbers appear simply to be constructed out of thin air.
Continue reading ...
But, according to a Financial Times investigation, the rock-star French economist appears to have got his sums wrong.
The data underpinning Professor Piketty’s 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth ofCarmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.
The central theme of Prof Piketty’s work is that wealth inequalities are heading back up to levels last seen before the first world war. The investigation undercuts this claim, indicating there is little evidence in Prof Piketty’s original sources to bear out the thesis that an increasing share of total wealth is held by the richest few.
Prof Piketty, 43, provides detailed sourcing for his estimates of wealth inequality in Europe and the US over the past 200 years. In his spreadsheets, however, there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source.
More
ON THIS STORY
- Flaws found in Piketty inequality data
- Video Doubts over Piketty inequality data
- Money Supply Piketty response to FT data concerns
- Money Supply Data problems with Capital in the 21st Century
- Robert Shrimsley The Piketty bubble
For example, once the FT cleaned up and simplified the data, the European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970. An independent specialist in measuring inequality shared the FT’s concerns.
Contacted by the FT, Prof Piketty said he had used “a very diverse and heterogeneous set of data sources ... [on which] one needs to make a number of adjustments to the raw data sources.
“I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future ... but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements,” he said.
His contention to have found a “central contradiction of capitalism” has in recent months made him a hero of the left. Although his conclusions have stirred controversy, there has, until now, been near unanimous praise for the quality of his statistical work.
On a tour of the US last month, Prof Piketty met Jacob Lew, US Treasury secretary, gave a presentation to the White House Council of Economic Advisers and lectured at the International Monetary Fund and the UN.
Piketty response
I am happy to see that FT journalists are using the excel files that I have put on line! I would very much appreciate if you could publish this response along with your piece.
Continue reading ...
Nobel Prize-winning economists have heaped praised on Mr Piketty’s work. Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University, said it was safe to say the book “will be the most important economics book of the year – and maybe of the decade”.
Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University said Prof Piketty’s “fundamental contribution” was the provision of data on the distribution of wealth. It was the subject of laudatory reviews in the Financial Times and other publications.
In Britain, Ed Miliband, Labour leader, told the Evening Standard: “I’m in the early stages of the book. In a way, he is symptomatic of what people are actually feeling”.
In his response to the FT, Prof Piketty said that more recent data not in his work showed “the rise in top wealth shares in the US in recent decades has been even larger than what I show in my book”.
Twitter: @ChrisGiles_