Picketty has going for him he is looking in the right places. He's "barking up the right tree". Small data errors are like correcting a dog for poor syntax. The

Picketty has going for him he is looking in the right places. He's "barking up the right tree". Small data errors are like correcting a dog for poor syntax. The question for the dog is: are you barking up the right tree or the wrong one? If "the william shakespeare of dogs" himeself was 3 miles away srpouting out elizbethan sonnet-equivalent barks up the wrong tree...the verdict would still be the same. The first dog can hunt and the second cannot--the imperfection of the communication doesn't undermine the underlying correctness (in tree-selection). The grammer-nazi type questions only matter insofar as they undermine the materiality of the analysis. What's important about picketty--notwithstanding the hype--is he's looking at balance-sheets not P&Ls. That is to say, he's barking up a different tree (than income obsessed economists). Probably the right tree--nobody would "analyse" the performance of a company without a blance sheet--for the task at hand. But most macro-econ guys cannot link up the GDP equivalent to a balance sheet (they lack the data), and thus totally ignore everything a blance sheet would tell us about ROIC (eg: linkages of C & I). That is a huge "material mistake". And one that is not done or undone by general quality of the communication (eg: a typo in the maths, or a debate over "accounting adjustments")--provided those are not so massive as to be materially misleading.