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 […]
Following this afternoon’s post, I decided to dig a little further into Thomas Piketty’s data spreadsheets. I’ll start with two general observations: I. Decennial Averaging Piketty seems to have an inordinate fondness for converting his data into decennial averages. Usually this is done by the not-terribly-sophisticated technique of simply adding up annual stats (or in many cases percentage
If you’ve been following the news for the past few days you’ve probably seen a reference to the Financial Times’ investigation of the data behind Thomas Piketty’s recent bestseller Capital in the 21st Century. While it is difficult to extrapolate intentions from data alone, it seems safe to say now that Piketty was – at minimum
In commiseration of tax day, it’s worth remembering that the 16th Amendment wrought unparalleled constitutional havoc by unchaining the taxing mechanisms of the federal government from the unwittingly adopted but more or less effective “capitations clause” of Article I, Section 9. While a tendency exists to think of this action as a hallmark of the
The 16th Amendment: It actually wasn’t about wealth redistribution Read More »
On Monday I weighed in on the Daily Show controversy surrounding the recent appearance of Andrew Napolitano, specifically looking at the Fugitive Slave Act. Whereas the historians on Jon Stewart’s panel seized upon Napolitano’s remarks attributing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act to Lincoln, I pointed out that at least in the narrow sense Napolitano
One of the most unusual documents in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Roy Basler, ed) is an excerpt of a letter allegedly written in 1864 by Lincoln to Gen. James S. Wadsworth. The document seems to reveal Lincoln’s support for universal black suffrage while also hinting at elements of an egalitarian turn in his racial views.
Lincoln and the Wadsworth Letter: a Reconstruction Forgery? Read More »
A little over a week ago I strongly criticized Judge Andrew Napolitano’s recent appearance on the Daily Show for his slipshod handling of Civil War history and for a couple of factual errors in his presentation about the Morrill Tariff. I was not the only critic, and others also seized upon Napolitano’s claim that Lincoln
Oakes, Napolitano, and Lincoln’s enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act Read More »
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs for shorthand, are all the rage these days in U.S. higher education. These technologically trendy, web-based providers of academic content have been touted as a fundamentally disruptive force in the higher ed marketplace and, in the most fanciful portrayals, perhaps even the beginning of the end for the traditional
It’s an argument we’ve all heard before: tariffs really “caused” the Civil War. The claim is unequivocally in error and was the historical biproduct of a conscious Confederate diplomatic strategy to draw the free trade-oriented Great Britain to its side in the war despite the latter’s antislavery disposition. There is a subtler truth though that
Before you start claiming that tariffs caused the Civil War… Read More »
The Civil War Memory blog has weighed in to the ongoing discussion about Lincoln and colonization with an interesting inquiry, asking “to what extent does Lincoln’s continued advocacy of colonization overshadow the rest of his public statements and policy decisions?” I’ve offered my thoughts in the comments section over there, echoing several points of my