May 27, 2014

The original post that started my ongoing examination of Thomas Piketty’s data specifically examined a series of irregularities on Figure 10.5, one of his key graphs to sustain his thesis of a trend of increasing US wealth disparity since the 1970s. As I noted, Piketty seems to be using a decennial averaging technique to clean […]

I mentioned in my previous post that Thomas Piketty really likes building decennial averages out of annual time series data. As part of the ongoing examination of his historical stats, let’s take a closer look at another one of his graphs, Figure 11.12 covering wealth transfers by inheritance as a percentage of national income across three European