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Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

nytimes.com

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Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#71

Post by Florin_Andrei »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #66
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not so easy to accept the lies about inequality when you and all your friends and relatives start losing their jobs and have their homes foreclosed. Except when the man on the talk radio blames it on "inept Big Government" or "excessive taxation". Then it's super-easy.

Given the amount we spend on government, the inefficient way it's run, and the value the taxpayer gets for the dollar (compared to e.g. Sweden), it's a huge, brightly painted target. It is not all of the problem, but it is a problem.

This is a bit like blaming the murder on the bullet, not on the criminal who pulled the trigger.

The US government would be in a very different shape indeed, if it wasn't owned by the highest bidder. It might be inefficiently run for you; but for the special interests who own all the lobbyists in D.C., and who pay all the politicians - for them it's just fine as-is, thank you.

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#72

Post by om2 »

tankenmate wrote: post #64
om2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FT data objections are far from the strongest objections to Pinketty's work. Here are a few criticisms seem much more serious than nitpicking the data: http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Papers/Piketty.pdf http://aida.wss.yale.edu/smith/piketty1.pdf http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/05/unp... In brief, his theoretical mechanisms that supposedly predict and explain greater wealth accumulation…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

I'm confused about how this comment applies. In this controversy, who is it that is failing to understand something, for salary-dependent reasons?

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#73

Post by Ma8ee »

001sky wrote: post #67
Ma8ee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weather forecasting is applied physics. The systems are big, some interactions aren't known precisely, and the boundary conditions are more complex than most physicists usually work with, but weather forecasting is definitely physics.

Your second sentence makes the first meaningless.

How so?

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#74

Post by ArkyBeagle »

conistonwater wrote: post #32
credo wrote: post #10

Unfortunately, ultimately, the research, data and analysis isn't going to matter much. Consider the debate on climate change, 98% of climate scientists agree that humans contribute significantly to climate change, but large numbers of Americans (including some of the most powerful politicians and talk-radio hosts) either deny climate change or claim that humans don't do much to cause climate change. I expect the ineq…

If the analogy with climate science works, then the inequality debate will be even worse than the climate change "debate". The straws on which climate change denialism rests are so small because the level of evidence one can reach with physics is so particularly high. Economics probably won't ever reach the same standard of evidence. To this day, people in politics are still having arguments about the relationship be…

It's apparently all 100% ideological. I have enjoyed reading economics but past some point, when it starts to be policy oriented, the thinking just stops. They pick a team and sing the team song.

The thing about inequality is that it's so shockingly close* to a lognormnal/Pareto distribution that my feeble brain says "biology!" and I stop thinking of it as a problem. It starts to feel to me like when I used to argue with algebra if I don't.

*I cut & pasted some data set from the Internet and the r-squared was way above 0.9

And apparently, if you read enough semantics that aren't really there into history, it looks like the best cure for inequality is to simply stop everything and have World War II again. Cures Depressions, too!

We could not engineer a proper monetary policy, so we sacrificed one in 25 of the world's population instead. And this worked!

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#75

Post by ArkyBeagle »

om2 wrote: post #72
tankenmate wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

I'm confused about how this comment applies. In this controversy, who is it that is failing to understand something, for salary-dependent reasons?

Economics is highly ideological.

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#76

Post by cookingrobot »

baddox wrote: post #69
pavlov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we have different definitions of "entangled".

It sounds like you're saying they shouldn't be entangled, which is reasonable, but under what definition of "entangled" are they not currently entangled?

They have no impact on each other's beliefs or findings. They're completely independent.

Re: Thomas Piketty Responds to Criticism of His Data

#77

Post by Mangalor »

om2 wrote: post #72
tankenmate wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

I'm confused about how this comment applies. In this controversy, who is it that is failing to understand something, for salary-dependent reasons?

The wealthy.
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