[adwhit]

Quoting from the response:

a 44% wealth share for the top 10% (and a 12.5% wealth share for the top 1%, according to the FT) would mean that Britain is currently one the most egalitarian countries in history in terms of wealth distribution; in particular this would mean that Britain is a lot more equal that Sweden, and in fact a lot more equal than what Sweden as ever been (including in the 1980s). This does not look particularly plausible

Shame on the FT.

[bjelkeman-again]

Having lived both in Sweden and in Britain you don't even need data to know this isn't very plausible. That said, Sweden is getting a bigger gap between the highest earners and the lowest at a fast rate. "the most equal country in the world is becoming less so." -The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/21564412

[bobcostas55]

You're confusing stocks with flows. Wealth inequality and income inequality are completely different things, and Sweden being more unequal than the UK does not seem at all implausible. Here's one paper from a few years ago showing exactly that result: http://darp.lse.ac.uk/papersdb/Cowell_(Hills_Wealth_UK).pdf

[svantana]

Particularly the "12.5% for the top 1%" is ridiculous and obviously too low for any modern, capital-intensive, non-socialist society. The FT should know this from their Economics 101, but it seems their main objective here was to discredit Piketty...

[Malarkey73]

And they only picked that method for recent years so inequality is declining in Britain? Through Thatcher and Blair years???

Right.

[hsksn78728]

Is this a joke? The UK's own Office for National Statistics derived that 44% figure, not the FT.

Shame on you.

[gress]

Shame on you for your appeal to authority. The question is do the statistics support Piketty's interpretation or not. Not who generated them.

[agarcia-deniz]

The point is that the FT switched from one type of data to another, as per usual truth is probably somewhere in the middle, which would probably still back up Mr Picketty's analysis.

As many people have said, is the UK one of the most equal societies in the world? This seems very unlikely