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Caveat Emptor

The opinions expressed on this page are mine alone. Any similarities to the views of my employer are completely coincidental.

Friday 30 May 2014

Piketty. Footnote on the footnote.

I think I'm beginning to change my opinion about Chris Giles. I really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but now I'm not sure. He's  responded to Piketty's response with five short paragraphs (six if you count the final one liner). Only one of these deals with the actual issues at stake and as far as I can tell the content is just ridiculous ie he just repeats the original accusations whilst ignoring Picketty's explanations and then makes several assertions that look manifestly untrue to me: 

"...he [Piketty] explains transcription errors as deliberate adjustments to overcome discontinuities in data, but does not provide formulas or an explanation of why these undocumented adjustments should apply to only one data point in a time series; he does not explain why it is consistent to favour household surveys over estate tax records for the US but not the UK..." 

er, no, that's not the way I read it...

I really expected better than this. Any more of this and I'll be dusting off my old copies of Marx which I thought I had consigned for ever to a cardboard box in the junk room.  The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas...

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