[crayola]

Taleb seems to be engaged in two vendettas (as is clear from reading the Black Swan): first, economists; second, the French.

One would therefore be well advised to take his notes about the work of a French economist with a pinch of salt.

"The optimal strategy is to go become an academic or a French-style civil servant, the anti-wealth generators."

To pick but one example among many others, Louis Pasteur was French, an academic and (therefore) a civil servant, and arguably contributed to save many lives. Or does that not qualify as wealth generation?

[yummyfajitas]

Taleb backs up his argument with careful math - is the math right or wrong?

[crayola]

Yes the maths are likely right, but that does mean Taleb is being fair to Piketty.

Economics is not just about the maths, it's about whether the maths being proposed (i.e. the model) are the right tool to understand and explain the observed data (and do predictions / counterfactuals). So the question of interest (is Piketty right or wrong) is not a question of someone's "maths" (either Piketty's or Taleb) being "right" or "wrong". Sorry if you find this obvious -- perhaps I missed the point of your question?

[notacoward]

I don't agree that Taleb's math is any more careful than Piketty's. He has his own set of "fat tail" hobby horses to ride, and does a poor job showing how they apply here. The question should not be whether Taleb's math is right or wrong, since it could be right but irrelevant. The question is whether Piketty's math is right or wrong. Neither Taleb, nor Brooks, nor many here, seem to be addressing that.

[yummyfajitas]

Taleb has a statistics paper that shows measurements of the exact sort Piketty is making are biased. Here is the paper.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbzRrRkhhc1RNY0U/...

So far as I can tell (I'm only halfway through Piketty) he has no math. Just a bunch of pretty graphs and lots of words.

[crayola]

This is a book for a wide audience. Not the right place for maths. But Piketty is a very respected researcher (at home and internationally), with an excellent grasp of the state of the art in econometric and economic modelling ('math'). Read his papers if you mistrust text and graphs.

[yummyfajitas]

I'm aware of who Piketty is. That's why I'm so surprised that he wrote such a voluminous tome with so little point. Last week before I read the book, I assumed it was just vapid reporters misunderstanding him.

If he has a paper which clearly and succinctly summarizes the point book, please point it out. Cause the book doesn't even contain a hint of that.

[crayola]

His most relevant papers (already linked by another commenter) are http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/PikettyZucman2014QJE.pdf and especially http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PikettyZucman2014HID.pdf.

More research here: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/fr/publications

I haven't said anything about clearly and succinctly though; I do not know if that kind of material exist. I believe the book to be a mix of original material, existing research (as linked above), and most of all the fruit of many years of productive research on these topics.

You are of course free to not buy Piketty's thesis based on his book alone; however, to convincingly build your case to convince others, it looks like you may have to absorb a fairly considerable body of knowledge.

On a more personal note -- while I am an economist by training (doctorate obtained in early 2010s in a top 10 uni), my field was quite far from Piketty's, so I am not in a position to know with any confidence whether he's right or wrong. (I would say though that his position certainly has merit and deserves the attention it is getting.) That being said, I maintain that Taleb shows himself as disconcertingly naive and frankly quite condescending to think that he can dismiss years of research in a few witty disparaging paragraphs. (Possibly without reading the book, almost certainly without reading the research, and very definitely without looking at the raw data.)

[shiven]

Now the math only argument is a bit of an anti-straw-man, ain't it?

2+2 == 4, always, so the underlying math is sound. But two bikes, a car don't make!