The current debate over wealth taxes show how difficult it is to collect accurate data on contemporary wealth and income. They were simply too ambitious to attempt to go back decades and centuries.
As mentioned by Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, Debraj Ray has a particularly interesting new essay on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. If you are theoretically inclined, you will find Ray’s comments to be one of the few reviews of Piketty that proves insightful.
I have little to add to Ray, but here are four comments about Piketty’s book:
1) The data collection effort on inequality by Piketty and coauthors is incredible and supremely interesting; not for nothing does Saez-Piketty 2003 have almost 2000 citations. Much of this data can be found in previous articles, of course, but it is useful to have it all in one place. Why it took so long for this data to become public, compared to things like GDP measures, is an interesting one which sociology Dan Hirschman is currently working on. Incidentally, the data quality complaints by the Financial Times seem…
View original post 1,014 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments