Taken together, these problems suggest that Piketty’s highly praised and historically-driven empirical work may actually be one of the book’s greatest weaknesses. In 2013, Thomas Piketty published a much discussed book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century arguing that widening inequality is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. Additional evidence suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive data assumption from the Soviet Union to accentuate one of his main historical claims about global “capitalism” in the 20th century. We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data. In this study we conduct a closer scrutiny of Piketty's empirics than has appeared thus far, focusing upon his treatment of the United States. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century has been widely debated on theoretical grounds, yet continues to attract acclaim for its historically-infused data analysis.
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