Tim Johnson — Piketty and the problems of data interpretation

A data scientist looks at Piketty and says not to worry, journalists like Chris Giles (and the FT staff that may have helped him) are not data scientists. If you want to throw out Piketty on this count, then prepare to throw out most of science.

Magic, Maths, and Money — The Relationship between Science and Finance
Piketty and the problems of data interpretation
Tim Johnson | Lecturer in Financial Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Tim Johnson appends an observation about capitalism as an economic system:

I have not read Piketty's book but I will, I will do so on the basis that I am dubious about his conclusions and I base this doubt on an intuition that he believes that capitalism inevitably leads to wealth inequality. I see this is a marxist (as distinct from Marxist) interpretation that rests on a sense of determinism. I believe that capitalism can take on many characters, just as eating is done differently in East Asian and West European cultures. In this respect we can construct a capitalism that does not lead to wealth inequality. (Of course, this may rest on how capitalism is defined, if it is defined on the basis of profit maximisation rather than market exchange, there is no hope for capitalism, in my opinion).

Yes, I think that the highlighted sentence is the crux of it. A lot of the kerfuffle about capitalism results from different definitions of it. When I say that capitalism is antithetical to democracy, I specify a definition of capitalism that privileges capital ownership consisting of money and machines over labor, signifying the vast majority of the world's people.