Brad DeLong — Piketty Day Here at Berkeley

How to sum up the argument of and the reaction to Thomas Piketty?…
In the communities in which I live and work, everybody is very impressed with Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

We are impressed with the amount of work that he and his colleagues have put into data collection, data assembly, and date cleaning. We are impressed with the amount of thought that has gone into the caddies attempt to understand the issue. Very impressed with how skillfully he has written his book. We are impressed with how much Arthur Goldhammer has sweated blood with the translation. And we are impressed with the intelligence with which he is constructed as arguments.

Now everybody has their complaints.
Everybody has 10-20% of the argument that they disagree with, and perhaps another 10 to 20% that they are unsure about. But it is a different 30% for everybody. There is not consensus but majority agreement that each piece of the book is roughly correct. And so there is rough near-consensus that the argument of the book is, broadly, right.

What are the serious complaints?

WCEG — The Equitablog
Piketty Day Here at Berkeley
Brad DeLong

See also, The Hourly Piketty: Paul Krugman, “Gattopardo Economics”, and Economic Modelling