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| Lefty Econ book based on faulty premise, bludgeoned data | |
| 2015-01-08 | |
| An example of Liberal 'Science'. Anything goes as long as it supports the official narrative. See also Global Warming. A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies. Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. But it contains more than 10 factual errors, according to one new study accepted by the Journal of Private Enterprise and conducted by economists Phillip Magness of George Mason University and Robert P. Murphy of the Institute for Energy Research. The authors write that they see a pattern in the errors.
- Kevin Hassett, American Enterprise Institute Sounds kind of like Globull worming doesn't it? “[The errors] serve to paint ostensibly market-friendly Republican presidents as ogres, while liberal Democrats are the heroes of the working class,” they write. They also conclude that, in building some of his charts, Piketty switched between data sets in a way that was biased in favor of his argument. In his graph on wealth in the U.S., for instance, Piketty relied on data from one study going up until 1950, then for 1960 he switched to another study, and then for 1970 he went back to relying on the first study again. Asked about the above issues, Piketty told FoxNews.com that there may be some typos in the book but said he did not think they affected his central conclusion. Bludgeoned data is not 'typos'. “I am really sorry if I attributed one specific tax decision to FDR instead of Hoover, etc.; many readers do mention typos of this sort, and of course they will be corrected in future editions; but I really do not see anything here that's affecting any conclusion,” Piketty told FoxNews.com. Also sounds like Globull Worming. "Fake... but accurate!" But a new study claims to find errors that affect Piketty’s fundamental premise. It was done by University of California Berkeley economics professor Alan Auerbach and American Enterprise Institute economist Kevin Hassett, and was presented Saturday at a session of the American Economics Association. Piketty, in his book, makes the case that the rich constantly get richer using a graph that illustrates that it has increased steadily in the United States over the last half-century. But the study finds that the graph is largely wrong. For instance, when Piketty’s graph refers to the year “1980”, the number actually comes from data from the year 1989. The authors also found that Piketty simply left several data points off of his chart without explanation. In short... he's a liar. Darn my surprise meter is in the shop. After revising the chart, the economists found that the proportion of wealth owned by the rich “no longer rises without interruption” and that in fact, “inequality appears to be declining at the end [of the graph].” Piketty told FoxNews.com that, even using the American authors’ graph, his ultimate conclusion remains intact. “The increase in inequality would look less steady, but it would still be there,” he said. A comparison of the two graphs is on page 6 of the American authors’ study. Hassett reponds that the new chart makes the case for measures like an 80% tax rate to stop increasing wealth inequality a lot less clear. “The trend towards higher inequality would look weaker… [inequality] would have fallen from its 1995 peak,” Hassett said. But Piketty counters that a recent study found that wealth inequality actually rose even faster than he had reported in his book. And who, pray tell, wrote that study? “Everybody recognizes that the Saez-Zucman series are indeed the best series on US wealth inequality we have so far, and that they show an even bigger increase than what I report in my book,” he told FoxNews.com. Another Globull Worming similarity: "The Science is Settled!" Yet many economists do not recognize that. “There are other recent papers, one… by Kopczuk (a co-author of Piketty’s in the past), plus another based on Fed survey data, by Bricker et al., which argue that other methods of analysis are more accurate and do not show such a trend,” Auerbach of UC Berkeley said. | |
| Posted by:CrazyFool |
| #17 "Former ENRON Advisor, Paul Krugman™" |
| Posted by: Frank G 2015-01-08 18:50 |
| #16 I wonder if anybody ever done the stats on who has better prediction accuracy record: economists or astrologers? I read somewhere that Krugman predicted seven of the last two recessions. |
| Posted by: badanov 2015-01-08 18:45 |
| #15 I wonder if anybody ever done the stats on who has better prediction accuracy record: economists or astrologers? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-01-08 18:19 |
| #14 Deflation is the only effective tax on wealth. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2015-01-08 17:05 |
| #13 Funny how they say 'Nobel prize winner' as if it really meant something. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2015-01-08 15:47 |
| #12 "Lefty Econ book based on faulty premise, bludgeoned data" Marx was the first |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2015-01-08 15:18 |
| #11 Not just Krugman - The NYT has pretty much lashed itself to Piketty's mast. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2015-01-08 14:12 |
| #10 Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year That alone strongly suggests Piketty is full of beans. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2015-01-08 12:21 |
| #9 Taxation of incomes causes underemployment and thus unemployment. The government then encourages debt to increase to try to correct this. You can see why the rent-seeking establishment might not mind "progressive" taxation, it creates their rents. |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2015-01-08 10:00 |
| #8 An underlying Motto of the Left - Fake but True. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-01-08 09:18 |
| #7 no mo uro, funny you mention Michael Bellisles. He was my first thought as well. If I remember correctly he sited sources saying they said things they didn't (and in some cases sources that were long destroyed) with the understanding that nobody would check, or if they did check his book would have been through the bestseller sales charts and gone before they did. And then the damage is done as most people don't see the correction, they just remember the trivia and incorrect facts. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2015-01-08 08:57 |
| #6 Clickable version of the graph at wiki site if you scroll down. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-01-08 08:47 |
| #5 Through the 1940s and 1950s, the highest tax rates were up in the 90 percent region. Only in wartime and shortly thereafter have tax rates been extremely high--mostly coming on the rich. There is an implicit assumption that sticking it to the rich is that somehow they didn't earn their money fair and square or that they can afford to foot more of the bill since they have it. It is application of those socialistic social justice and redistribution concepts that the lefties love so much. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-01-08 08:45 |
| #4 "Factual inaccuracies do not impact conclusions?" Of course not, Besoeker. Just ask Dan Rather, Michael Bellisles, Jared Diamond, or Professor Piketty. Fake but accurate - the mantra of today's left. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2015-01-08 07:54 |
| #3 Piketty switched between data sets in a way that was biased in favor of his argument Yes it does sound a lot like mann made data. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2015-01-08 07:24 |
| #2 Asked about the above issues, Piketty told FoxNews.com that there may be some typos in the book but said he did not think they affected his central conclusion. Factual inaccuracies do not impact conclusions ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-01-08 06:39 |
| #1 The reality is that governments in the West and in particular the U.S. have been borrowing money since the '70's to artificially prop up a level of lifestyle equality that is unnatural and unsustainable for individuals and families who are involved in unskilled and semiskilled labor, government employment, and skilled labor for which there is an oversupply. Although this has been done primarily by the left, politicians of both parties are guilty of this. Piketty is a class warfare arsonist. He and his wealthy supporters are pouring gasoline on a fire composed of envy and officiousness and relative deprivation in a public that has suffered from moral breakdown and cultural and economic amnesia. What we now define as working class or middle class would be thought of as rich at all times in human history before 1930. At some point the credit-supported utopia made by cynical and dishonest politicians, that was created by purchasing votes from citizens in exchange for a lifestyle is not justified by the level of value that their labor produces and that they could never achieve by free association in the economic realm, must collapse, because it is mathematically impossible to sustain. Piketty and his type are doing everything they can to prop up this system even if only for a a few more months because they know that they, not the people they purport to care about, are the ones who largely profit from this system. Motivations as well as facts are suspect as well. Piketty and the rest of the wealthy blue-state model types are the primary benefactors of the big-business/big government redistributive state, and know that the standard of living and status they can achieve in a more free enterprise type of society would be vastly diminished. To believe that they do what they do out of some vast upwelling of compassion or lofty sense of fairness is ridiculous on its face. Further, all the efforts at mitigating so-called "unfair" equality inevitably result in a widening of the gap between the super wealthy and everyone else. The classic example is the New Deal in the 1930's. Piketty and his ilk must lie, because the facts on the ground objectively prove that the default state of growing and robust economies is one of less, not more, government interference and attempts at central redistribution of wealth. Like Michael Bellisles in the realm of gun control, Piketty had to cobble together a bunch of unrelated and fabricated data in order to prove something he WANTED to believe and something he has made a lot of money by promoting, rather than what actually works in the real world. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2015-01-08 06:23 |