Justin Wolfers
speaker
76 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2012
last heard Jun 2014
Justin Wolfers’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I think he's uncovered a bunch of small flaws, even if
You took everything that Chris said at face value.
I don't think it fundamentally changes the message of Piketty about wealth inequality through time or the broader message of the book.
Chris criticised Piketty for making specific choices about how you can put very different data sets together, yet when he compiles his own time series of wealth inequality, he's also had to try and compare apples and oranges, and he's done so in a way that I think
It led me to admire Chris Giles more as a journalist for digging in and
really trying to understand the data.
But then I took a step back, a big step back.
And while I think he's uncovered a bunch of small flaws, even if you took everything that Chris said at face value, I don't think it fundamentally changes the message of Piketty about wealth inequality through time or the broader message of the book.
All economic data have errors in them.
and a little bit of noise upward on some data points and a little bit of noise downward on other data points isn't going to change the underlying trends.
Chris criticised Piketty for making specific choices about how you can put very different data sets together, yet when he compiles his own time series of wealth inequality, he's also had to try and compare apples and oranges, and he's done so in a way that I think
it looks like expert opinion is coalescing around the view that his proposal
isn't rock solid and may even be substantially weaker than Piketty's.
And both of these, I think, came in to debates that were hotly politically contested.
With the Reinhardt-Rogoff furor, the left was very unhappy that conservatives had used this as an argument for austerity.
And so they took some evidence of a spreadsheet error as being a broader battering ram for trying to knock down the claims around austerity.
And likewise, you're seeing the right today looking at simple transcription errors and other errors.
as a broader battering ram for knocking down something the left have really taken to, which is Piketty's views about rising wealth inequality and the inevitability of that.
In each case, even if you knock over the prize graph or the prize chart, there's still the broader constellation of evidence that needs to be reckoned with.
I begin to consider escaping from this butterless hell.
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