Piketty Math

The media is developing some stories that Thomas Piketty got the math wrong in his now-infamous Capital in the Twenty-First Century.  We've seen this before.  A year or so ago, the models in Reinhart and Rogoff's This Time is Different were revealed to have some errors in calculation.   

A couple of points here.

First, unlike the natural sciences, economics is not inherently quantitative.  Economics is a study of human action, and there are no static laws of how humans will behave.  While quantitative methods can reveal insights into human behavior and economic trends, it will never be able to predict with total accuracy any economic theory.

Secondly, and probably more important for Piketty, is that the numbers don't matter.  Piketty is motivated by his ends, and the models are just supporting evidence.  Tom Woods had a great program with Bob Murphy the other day, picking apart the tenets of Piketty's book.  The most damning to me was that Piketty more or less admits that his calls to action are driven less by economic outcome than an egalitarian sense of "fairness."  

I remember reading in Mises' Human Action that if we look at the ends to which we are addressing our economic theory, most people are generally on the same page.  Everyone wants freedom, a high standard of living, etc.  This may have been the case in Mises's time, but it is hard to say whether that is true now.  Dennis Prager develops this idea a bit further.  It relates as much to Piketty as his own examples.