Thomas Piketty Cooked the Data in 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'

Well, what do we have here?

At Legal Insurrection, "Report: Thomas Piketty’s numbers are off."

They're "off" --- to say the least. Shoot, they're "manufactured" is probably closer to the truth.

At Instapundit, "LEFTY WISH-FULFILLMENT BOOK ALL FAKED-UP? THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE. The Financial Times Isn’t Just Saying Piketty Made A Mistake — They’re Saying He Manipulated Data."

Piketty admits he made "some improvements" in the data:

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.

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.

Right.

I'd be "very surprised" if the rest of his flimflam socialist tome doesn't keep falling apart at the seams.



More from Erika Johnson, at Hot Air, "Financial Times: We’ve found some, ahem, “serious inconsistencies” in Thomas Piketty’s numbers." And at Memeorandum.