Journamalism: Do the writers of the London Economist read their own rag? It seems that they probably do not.

I read today that: “a paper finding that <economist.com/finance-and-economics/202… after taxes and transfers American incomes are barely less equal than in the 1960s was accepted for publication…. Piketty’s faction is on the defensive, accusing its critics of ‘inequality denial’…”

But if the Economist writers had read their own magazine, they would have been given substantial pause, because they would have read Wojciech Kopczuk’s observation: “The remarkable thing is that almost all of their modifications push in the same direction—that’s something you wouldn’t expect a priori.” It really is not. Studies that put their thumb on the scale to that degree are highly untrustworthy. That should have given the bosses who wrote the piece I quote below a lot of pause.

And I think they should have just put their piece in the circular file once they had reflected enough to notice this: Elon Musk’s wealth today is 2.5 million times median family income while Daniel Ludwig’s—his predecessor back in 1982—wealth was only 85 thousand times median income tells me that top income and wealth inequality has really exploded in a way totally inconsistent with Auten and Splinter’s claims. It is Auten and Splinter—not Piketty and company—who seem to me to be very much on the defensive, in the sense of having a very hard time answering simple questions about the implications of their numbers:

Economist: Economists had a dreadful 2023 <economist.com/leaders/2023/12/20/econom…>: ‘Economists who deal in sober empirical work have also had their conclusions challenged. Consider… inequality…. Thomas Piketty and his co-authors… found a rising gap between rich and poor. But in November a paper finding that <economist.com/finance-and-economics/202… after taxes and transfers American incomes are barely less equal than in the 1960s was accepted for publication by one of the discipline’s top journals. Now Mr Piketty’s faction is on the defensive, accusing its critics of “inequality denial”…