Setting the record straight

Thomas Piketty is a well-known French economist who published a voluminous book titled Capital in the Twenty First Century, which challenged numerous established economic theories on growth and development. It is usual for elite economists to challenge conventional economic wisdom, but what separates Piketty from the rest is the use of gigabytes of empirical data. He collected economic data from developed countries covering a period of almost a century to show that the rate of return to capital is much greater than the rate of economic growth. He argued that an economy left to work by itself will inevitably lead to growing income inequality or disparity.

After Piketty's work, data mining has become the foremost preoccupation among economists, compared to the theory building of their predecessors. It was argued that if it is not reflected by reality or by empirical evidence, the theory either rests on tenuous ground or simply flawed.