It turns out that Pickety's numbers are wrong

[Quantum Windbag]

Damn, the greatest book in the history of the 21st century is based on faked numbers.

Thomas Piketty’s book, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, has been the publishing sensation of the year. Its thesis of rising inequality tapped into the zeitgeist and electrified the post-financial crisis public policy debate.
But, according to a Financial Times investigation, the rock-star French economist appears to have got his sums wrong.
The data underpinning Professor Piketty’s 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings. The FT found mistakes and unexplained entries in his spreadsheets, similar to those which last year undermined the work on public debt and growth of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff.

Piketty findings undercut by errors - FT.com

Just in case anyone thinks the Financial Times is biased, Krugman agrees that the numbers are wrong, but excuses it because, well, it shows how evil capitalism is.

And yet there is one thing that slightly detracts from the achievement—a sort of intellectual sleight of hand, albeit one that doesn’t actually involve any deception or malfeasance on Piketty’s part. Still, here it is: the main reason there has been a hankering for a book like this is the rise, not just of the one percent, but specifically of the American one percent. Yet that rise, it turns out, has happened for reasons that lie beyond the scope of Piketty’s grand thesis.

Why We?re in a New Gilded Age by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books

As usual, Krugman is wrong. It turns out that, if you actually dig down far enough, it turns out that we are talking about roughly 100,000 salaries that throw the balance off. Pickety blames this on the ability of CEOs to set their own pay, but a 2010 paper counters that assumption.

Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936--2005