Problems with Piketty
25th May 2014
Steve Sailer brings us up to date on the latest darling of the Left.
I’m always fascinated by the dynamics of reputation. For example, when Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz demonstrated in late 2005, a half year after the publication of Freakonomics, that Steven D. Levitt’s most famous theory — that legalizing abortion cut crime — was the result of Levitt’s sloppiness in writing Stata code (not Excel, by the way), the impact on Levitt’s career was negligible. His reputation only started to decline a few years later with the publication of SuperFreakonomics in which Levitt didn’t demonstrate complete fidelity to the climate change orthodoxy.
Basically, there was no money to be made in showing that the facts didn’t support Levitt’s conclusion. In contrast, there is a lot of money arrayed against Piketty, so we’ll hear more about it.