[credo]

Unfortunately, ultimately, the research, data and analysis isn't going to matter much.

Consider the debate on climate change, 98% of climate scientists agree that humans contribute significantly to climate change, but large numbers of Americans (including some of the most powerful politicians and talk-radio hosts) either deny climate change or claim that humans don't do much to cause climate change.

I expect the inequality debate to play out in a similar fashion. Many economists may agree with Piketty. However, the FT has thrown sufficient "doubt" on his findings (it doesn't matter that they compare past tax data with today's "survey" data etc).

This "doubt" provides sufficient ammunition for those who'd like to deny that inequality is on the increase. So the debate will end up as another one of those "he said, he said" topics in the media and people are likely to take sides based on which side of the ideological divide they are one.

[om2]

The FT data objections are far from the strongest objections to Pinketty's work. Here are a few criticisms seem much more serious than nitpicking the data:

http://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Papers/Piketty.pdf http://aida.wss.yale.edu/smith/piketty1.pdf http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/05/unp...

In brief, his theoretical mechanisms that supposedly predict and explain greater wealth accumulation are actually unsound, and if anything this seems to be the evolving consensus among economists who study the area.

[tankenmate]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -- Upton Sinclair

[om2]

I'm confused about how this comment applies. In this controversy, who is it that is failing to understand something, for salary-dependent reasons?

[ArkyBeagle]

Economics is highly ideological.

[Mangalor]

The wealthy.

[Zuider]

It is even harder when there is an ideological block. In the first case, you get stonewalled, and ultimately ignored. In the case of ideology, you get shouted down, mobbed, and subject to various preemptive attacks intended to discredit and demoralize you before you even get to make your case.

[baddox]

Climate change and macroeconomics are really similar in this regard. I think the main reason there is so much controversy is because the science is so entangled with the politics, and that probably applies to the experts just as much as it applies to the average onlooker.

[pavlov]

Climate research is nothing like economics. Politics is involved in how we should react to the scientific results, but that doesn't mean the science itself is "entangled" with politics.

You might just as well suggest that paleontology is entangled with religion because its findings offend some people's religious views.

[baddox]

> You might just as well suggest that paleontology is entangled with religion because its findings offend some people's religious views.

I absolutely would say that.

[pavlov]

I guess we have different definitions of "entangled".

[baddox]

It sounds like you're saying they shouldn't be entangled, which is reasonable, but under what definition of "entangled" are they not currently entangled?

[cookingrobot]

They have no impact on each other's beliefs or findings. They're completely independent.

[dllthomas]

Ideologies climb.

[conistonwater]

If the analogy with climate science works, then the inequality debate will be even worse than the climate change "debate". The straws on which climate change denialism rests are so small because the level of evidence one can reach with physics is so particularly high. Economics probably won't ever reach the same standard of evidence.

To this day, people in politics are still having arguments about the relationship between inflation and fed interest rates, two of the most easily-observed quantities in the economy. Imagine what the inequality debate will be like in comparison.

[001sky]

Physics and weather forecasting are not similar endeavours. Nor is the relationship with fed interest rates and inflation transparent. FYI "people in politics" describes every economist. their businesss model relies on someone listening to them. Those people pay them money. And those are all "people in politics".

[Ma8ee]

Weather forecasting is applied physics. The systems are big, some interactions aren't known precisely, and the boundary conditions are more complex than most physicists usually work with, but weather forecasting is definitely physics.

[001sky]

Your second sentence makes the first meaningless.

[Ma8ee]

How so?

[ArkyBeagle]

It's apparently all 100% ideological. I have enjoyed reading economics but past some point, when it starts to be policy oriented, the thinking just stops. They pick a team and sing the team song.

The thing about inequality is that it's so shockingly close* to a lognormnal/Pareto distribution that my feeble brain says "biology!" and I stop thinking of it as a problem. It starts to feel to me like when I used to argue with algebra if I don't.

*I cut & pasted some data set from the Internet and the r-squared was way above 0.9

And apparently, if you read enough semantics that aren't really there into history, it looks like the best cure for inequality is to simply stop everything and have World War II again. Cures Depressions, too!

We could not engineer a proper monetary policy, so we sacrificed one in 25 of the world's population instead. And this worked!

[alexeisadeski3]

>>I expect the inequality debate to play out in a similar fashion. Many economists may agree with Piketty.

Whilst "many" economists most surely do agree with Piketty's data, it is closer to 50-50 than the 98% found in climate science.

Additionally, the number of economists who agree with Piketty's data but disagree with him over it's implications (that's the important part) will be smaller still.

[chongli]

Fortunately (or unfortunately) inequality and poverty have significant, damaging effects on the voting public. It's easy to buy into the idea that global warming is a conspiracy when you walk outside on a cool day. It's not so easy to accept the lies about inequality when you and all your friends and relatives start losing their jobs and have their homes foreclosed.

[Florin_Andrei]

> It's not so easy to accept the lies about inequality when you and all your friends and relatives start losing their jobs and have their homes foreclosed.

Except when the man on the talk radio blames it on "inept Big Government" or "excessive taxation". Then it's super-easy.

[SoftwareMaven]

Given the amount we spend on government, the inefficient way it's run, and the value the taxpayer gets for the dollar (compared to e.g. Sweden), it's a huge, brightly painted target. It is not all of the problem, but it is a problem.

[Florin_Andrei]

This is a bit like blaming the murder on the bullet, not on the criminal who pulled the trigger.

The US government would be in a very different shape indeed, if it wasn't owned by the highest bidder. It might be inefficiently run for you; but for the special interests who own all the lobbyists in D.C., and who pay all the politicians - for them it's just fine as-is, thank you.

[econghiy]

Several Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong have extremely high inequality rates yet far lower unemployment rates than the US. Where is your proof that inequality causes job losses?

[chongli]

I never said inequality causes job losses. On the contrary, job losses cause inequality.

[om2]

Job losses as the mechanism of inequality would very little nothing to do with Piketty's claims, which are about concentration of wealth at the very top due to intrinsic properties of returns on capital. Piketty's theory doesn't involve this either causing or being caused by job losses. So seeing unemployed people and taking it as confirmation of his work would be incorrect.

(In any case if you are correct about direction of causation, then surely we should worry about how to reduce job losses than how to take wealth away from the rich.)

[econghiy]

But countries like France and Spain have persistently high unemployment rates yet much lower inequality than countries like Singapore and Hong Kong.

How do you explain that?

[EdwardDiego]

Deliberate government policy to prevent inequality.

[jstalin]

I'm surprised anyone is still repeating that 98% consensus hoax. http://richardtol.blogspot.com/2013/08/open-letter-to-vice-c...

[epistasis]

I'm sorry, are you seriously saying that this paper was a hoax and the data was manufactured, based on a ranty blog post?

That's ridiculous, and just proves the point of the comment you were replying to.

[pdeuchler]

Dr. Tol was appointed to both the Copenhagen Consensus and the IPCC, is an accomplished and respected economist, and very often is a voice of reason for both sides of the debate.

I hope you can appreciate the meta-irony of declaring a blog post "ranty" to invalidate its findings and then going on to accuse the parent of proving a point about partisan ideology.

[epistasis]

First, the blog post does not rise to calling the initial survey a hoax. So that addition of jstalin's, is well, completely ridiculous and inappropriate.

Second, the blog post is ranty (and many if not most scientists are ranty, in case you hadn't noticed). The associated comment manuscript isn't evidence of a hoax. I'm not surprised it wasn't accepted anywhere. There's no meta-irony in pointing that out.

[om2]

The post seems like strong evidence that the finding of the paper is wrong, or at least not justified by the study performed. "Hoax" taken literally would imply deliberate malfeasance, and that doesn't seem to be proven

[conistonwater]

I read the linked blog post, and found it somewhat unconvincing.

I am equally surprised anyone is repeating the myth of consensus myth: http://www.salon.com/2014/05/28/wsjs_shameful_climate_denial...

[jstalin]

No response is complete without a reference to the Koch brothers, indeed.

[soneca]

exactly what is described here:

"Why do people persist in believing things that just aren't true?"

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05...

HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7769266

[Zuider]

Where are you getting the 98% figure for belief that humans contribute significantly to climate change? Can you provide a citation? What exactly does 'significant' mean? Can you provide a citation for this?