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Revisiting Piketty’s Summary of the U.S. Minimum Wage
The good news is that one person responded to my labor of love (i.e. my long comment) on Scott Alexander’s post on Piketty. The bad news is that the guy’s response contained stuff like this: If that’s the worst, most partisan error in Piketty, then I’m not too concerned. If anything I’m more concerned about […]
Read moreMaybe Piketty Will Fix His Basic Facts in the Third Edition
For the context here, Piketty’s bestseller totally botched the history of the US minimum wage in the post-1980 era, in a way that conveniently praised Democrats and excoriated Republicans. (Phil Magness and I documented it in our paper, but Veronique de Rugy–I think?–was the first person who flagged this one.) Anyway, someone sent me screenshots […]
Read moreSolving the Great Piketty Minimum Wage History Mystery
My latest at Mises CA. For the quick version, Phil Magness showed me a data table from Piketty that makes it clearer what the heck happened with Piketty’s erroneous “history” of the U.S. minimum wage. Specifically, Piketty came up with annual values by looking at the minimum wage as it stood on January 1 of […]
Read moreTranslate Piketty?
Do we have any fluent French speakers who can translate these two paragraphs, taken from an August 2014 Piketty column (HT2 Magness)? La croissance perpétuelle de la population, le dynamisme de ses universités et de ses innovations ont pour l’instant préservé le pays de cette dérive. Mais cela ne suffit plus. Une première fois déjà, […]
Read morePiketty Makes Up “Facts” and I’m the Bad Guy
I’m being cheeky in the title, but my irritation is real. Both ideological friends and foes have been chiding me for (in my paper co-authored with Phil Magness) focusing on trivial details, like Piketty getting the dates wrong for tax hikes and minimum wage increases. Big deal, Murphy! Focus on the inequality data. But Phil […]
Read morePhil Magness on the Tom Woods Show Discussing Our Piketty Paper
Tom does a good job of pulling out the news you can use. Here are the show notes for this episode, and here is the link to get the paper. The neat thing about this episode is even I learned something: At the end Tom asks Phil how he got interested in this. Phil answers […]
Read moreMy Response to Piketty’s Response to My Paper With Magness
At Mises CA. An excerpt: OK that is pretty astounding. I encourage readers who haven’t done so, to click on our paper and just read the short sections on the Hoover/FDR tax rates and the minimum wage discussion. If those were “typos,” then when Bill Clinton said he didn’t have sexual relations with Monica Lewinski, it […]
Read morePiketty Makes “Typos,” Bryan Caplan Cites “Noise”
This is odd. Bryan Caplan apparently wrote in his book on irrational voters: There are countless issues that people care about, from gun control and abortion to government spending and the environment… If you know a person’s position on one, you can predict his view on the rest to a surprising degree. In formal statistical […]
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