The saga on the data problems in Piketty’s book continues. Giles responds to the debate that has been unfolding, and notes that the academic community has as a whole been rather forgiving of Piketty, but that in Giles’ view:
Academic economists have got themselves into a bad spot if undocumented data, errors and tweaks are considered by some acceptable research practice.
Nate Silver also writes a useful commentary and relates the data problems to broader questions of peer review and replication. He provides a link to a website documenting articles that are retracted because of grave mistakes.
I beat him to the Nit Piketty pun!!! But I don’t blog so it was not seen.