Sly, Brad. Very sly

For weeks Berkeley's J. Bradford DeLong has been in denial over a fundamental little error made by Thomas Piketty in his best seller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Stridently claiming that the profession's most respected members who pointed out the flawed logic in that book were wrong, wrong wrong!

Today, he quietly concedes he was wrong and they were right;

Matt Rognlie has a first-rate exposition of his critique of Piketty:

Matt Rognlie: A note on Piketty and diminishing returns to capital: “Capital in the Twenty-First Century predicts…

…a rise in capital’s share of income and the gap r – g between capital returns and growth…. Neither outcome is likely given realistically diminishing returns to capital accumulation. Instead–all else equal–more capital will erode the economywide return on capital…. Piketty (2014)’s inference of a high elasticity from time series is unsound, assuming a constant real price of capital despite the dominant role of rising prices in pushing up the capital/income ratio. Recent trends in both capital wealth and income are driven almost entirely by housing, with underlying mechanisms quite different from those emphasized in Capital….

If Rognlie's analysis is a first-rate exposition of Piketty's Capital, and it comes to the same conclusion as Per Krusell, Tony Smith, and James Hamilton (as well as Sala y Martin and others). Then these from DeLong earlier must be inoperative;

9 June 2014Depreciation Rates on Wealth in Thomas Piketty’s Database: Monday Focus: June 9, 2014Thomas Piketty emails: We do provide long run series on capital depreciation in the "Capital is back" paper with Gabriel [Zucman] (see http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/capitalisback, appendix country tables US.8, JP.8, etc.). The series are imperfect and incomplete, but they show that in pretty much every country capital depreciation has risen from 5-8% of GDP in the 19th… More >

8 June 2014In Which I Continue to Fail to Understand Why Critics of Piketty Say What They Say: (Late) Friday Focus for June 6, 2014Per Krusell II So I wrote this on Friday, and put it aside because I feared that it might be intemperate, and I do not want to post intemperate things in this space. Today, Sunday, I cannot see a thing I want to change--save that I am, once again, disappointed by the quality of critics…More >

5 June 2014Trying, Yet Again, to Communicate the Arithmetic Scaffolding of Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”: Thursday Focus: June 5, 2014I am once again flummoxed by the number of economists of note and reputation who have been commenting on Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century without, apparently, bothering to do the work to understand the basic arithmetic scaffolding of the book. I think that the most fruitful way to understand the basic arithmetic is via… More >

2 June 2014Department of “Huh?!”–I Don’t Understand More and More of Piketty’s Critics: Per Krusell and Tony SmithAs time passes, it seems to me that a larger and larger fraction of Piketty's critics are making arguments that really make no sense at all--that I really do not understand how people can believe them, or why anybody would think that anybody else would believe them. Today we have Per Krusall and Tony Smith… More >

Must have been cold out there on that limb, eh, Brad?