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 […]
Straining at gnats while swallowing Piketty’s camels Read More »
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.
Last night FoxNews.com ran a decent synopsis of the new article on data errors in Capital and the 21st Century that Robert Murphy and I have coming out in the Journal of Private Enterprise, as well as the new article by Kevin Hassett and Alan Auerbach that I mentioned in my last post. While I tend to be skeptical of
Is Piketty’s conclusion unaffected by his data problems? Read More »
One of the main critiques I’ve made of Thomas Piketty’s data, starting on this blog last May and appearing in my newly released paper with Robert Murphy on the subject, concerns his Figure 10.5, purporting to show the trend of wealth inequality in the United States. As I pointed out at the time, this chart suffers
Piketty goes cherry-picking for US Wealth Inequality Read More »
I first became aware of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century last spring, though not from the onset of “Pikettymania” amidst its skyrocketing to the top of the best seller list. Rather, a couple of faculty colleagues brought it to my attention for its data. Knowing of my own research interests in historical
An Empirical Critique of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” Read More »
This evening brings word of the passing of the brilliant and witty economist Gordon Tullock. Though his contributions were many and spanned over half a century, the best known and perhaps most consequential came in the form of a 1967 article in the then-obscure Western Economic Journal which first posited and formalized the theory that became known as rent seeking. His
Earlier this year I blogged at length about a series of data errors, large and small, in Thomas Piketty’s bestselling book Capital in the 21st Century (a summary of Piketty’s remaining errors may be found here, and an extended discussion of Piketty’s misuse of Soviet Union data assumptions to produce a desired result may be found here). One of
Piketty, Saez-Zucman, and the primacy of high progressive taxation Read More »
In a recent column for the Washington Post, political scientist Henry Farrell attempted to lay part of the blame of two notorious historical events on what he sees as a “laissez faire” mentality that operates at the expense of human suffering. The occasion for Farrell’s claim is a curious one. He employed an ill-worded and somewhat tactless review
Of Irish Famines, Slavery, and the libeling of laissez-faire Read More »
The history of thought is an inherently tricky evidentiary exercise, as it typically involves a need to discern intention from written words left by the subjects in question. Its better practitioners attempt to understand the parameters of a particular decision or argument by weighing the available evidence around it and interpreting it in light of the context in
Historical Revision and the alleged “myth” of an exploitable Phillips Curve Read More »
New York Times writer Paul Krugman offered up a deliciously ironic suggestion in his most recent column: So I have some advice for so-called reform conservatives trying to rebuild the intellectual vitality of the right: You need to start by facing up to the fact that your movement is in the grip of some uncontrollable urges. In particular, it’s
The history of Paul Krugman’s own alarmist “inflation addiction” Read More »