Nate Silver on Piketty

More mandatory Piketty coverage:

Nate Silver weighs in on "Spreadsheet-gate" with a surprisingly balanced take.  I had always assumed Silver to be a left-leaning ideologue, but he provides thoughtful analysis here on the use of data in the social sciences. 

While I understand the unreliable nature of economic data, it is still hard to absolve doctorate-level economists of making pretty simple spreadsheet errors.  Malign it all you like, but good spreadsheet skills require as much methodology as the data gathering itself.   Piketty's hard-coding would have been shot down pretty quickly in most workplace settings.