January 2015

Cherry-Pikettying

My previous posts on the data problems in Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century have focused almost entirely on errors contained within his data charts and files. But what happens when one tries to reconstruct those files? To find out, I conducted a simple experiment using Piketty’s Figure 10.5 – the widely cited depiction of

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Straining at gnats while swallowing Piketty’s camels

One of the hazards of writing an academic article that garners a substantial amount of media attention is that it will often attract critics of widely inconsistent quality. While some of this criticism can be healthy and foster productive discussions, a fair amount of it tends toward the “grasping at straws” variety. Earlier this evening Brad DeLong re-posted

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A Strauss Divided Against Itself…

Two celebrated Straussian philosophers of the American political tradition, Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa, passed away yesterday. The two were notably students of the same philosophical strain, though also mutual interlocutors within that tradition who at times became irascible in their own exchanges.  Owing to a common Lincoln interest, my own work engaged Jaffa more directly than Berns.

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