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You're right, Piketty is correct because Taleb did not format his citations in the manner you desire.

• vannevar 10y ago
  Not what I said. I didn't say Piketty was correct, only that your assertion was unsupported by the evidence you presented. FYI, I believe this is the paper you were referring to: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf The gist of the paper as far as I can tell is that when sampling fat-tailed distributions, it's easy to 'miss' outliers on the tail that would significantly change the average observed. So in Piketty's historical analysis, the rise in inequality might simply be due to better samples as data becomes easier to get. If you actually read the book, though, it's not clear that data became uniformly better over time---there's some indication that recent data actually became worse. It's also clear from the book that Piketty's conclusion wasn't based solely on aggregations of equality data, but also historical returns on capital that would not be subject to Taleb's bias. In short, at best, Taleb offers an alternative explanation for the historical inequality data. More of a caveat than a refutation.