A recent analysis alleging that Thomas Piketty's groundbreaking data on inequality contains errors is "just ridiculous," according to the French economist.
In an email to Bloomberg News, Piketty dismissed a report published Friday in the Financial Times alleging that his book, Capital In The Twenty-First Century, contains "many unexplained data entries and errors in the figures underlying some of the book’s key charts." The book has surged in popularity and sparked new conversations on inequality on a global scale.
"There’s no mistake or error,” Piketty wrote to Bloomberg News. Piketty earlier defended his work in a blog post that ran on the Financial Times' website.
The Financial Times' report by Chris Giles, which alleged that some of the conclusions Piketty makes aren't supported by the data provided in the book, has come under a lot of scrutiny since it was published.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman questioned Giles' analysis in a blog post published in The New York Times on Saturday.
"The point is that Giles is proving too much," Krugman wrote. "Anyone imagining that the whole notion of rising wealth inequality has been refuted is almost surely going to be disappointed."
Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also came to Piketty's defense in a blog post on the Times' The Upshot.
"The Financial Times analysis is definitely provocative," Wolfers wrote. "While it raises important questions, I’m not convinced it does more than that."