Mike Konczal — The FT's Piketty Criticism is Nothing Like the Reinhart-Rogoff Affair

Several people are comparing Chris Giles’s piece in the Financial Times, which criticizes the data Thomas Piketty used in his book Capital in the 21st Century, to the Reinhart-Rogoff (R-R) incident from last year. That was when Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s paper ”Growth in a Time of Debt,” which found that growth went negative above a 90 percent debt-to-GDP threshold, was criticized by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin (HAP). HAP found data and methodology errors in R-R, and now Giles finds data and methodology errors in Piketty. (I wrote about Giles’s article here.)

So the critiques must be similar, right? No. They are quite different, and in fact there are at least four ways in which they are practically the opposite of each other: in their transparency; in the object of their criticism; in the severity of their critiques; and in their democratic implications.

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The FT's Piketty Criticism is Nothing Like the Reinhart-Rogoff Affair
Mike Konczal
(h/t Jan Milch)