Why didn’t Piketty’s Harvard publisher spot the errors which the FT has exposed?

While Americans swooned over Thomas Piketty and his thesis about ever-rising inequality it has taken a Brit, the FT’s Chris Giles, to expose the corruptions in his data. What he has found – on the cover of today’s FT and in detail on a blog here – is shocking because the errors are so basic. And yet on this, Piketty has built a manifesto for all kinds of tax rises. It makes you wonder how his publisher, Harvard University Press, allowed such flaws to enter print.

Chris Giles’ report is worth reading in full, but here are a couple of examples should give you a flavour of what he has found. It started when he came across a fairly major mistake. As he says in his blog:

Piketty cited a figure showing the top 10 per cent of British people held 71 per cent of total national wealth. The Office for National Statistics latest Wealth and Assets Survey put the figure at only 44 per cent. This