Paul Krugman: A Failed Critique of Piketty

The economist Thomas Piketty has replied at length to the attempted takedown of his work in Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Chris Giles, the economics editor at The Financial Times, and he has done it very effectively. Essentially, Mr. Giles tried to compare apples and oranges, and the result was a lemon.

The central point here is one that's familiar to anyone who works at length on inequality issues. We have two kinds of data on distribution of both income and wealth: surveys, in which people are asked what they make or own, and tax data.