I like graphs and Thomas Piketty

So here's a Thomas Piketty graph.

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

God that's depressing.

[MrNumbers]

The attached article has more comprehensive data analysis but that one's obviously my favourite

[Milo_Chalks]

A fine example of hyper-capitalism at it's finest 👌
Hope you like being been born into riches

[Selbi]

At first, I wasn't sure if I was missing the joke here.

i.imgur.com/UUHQJjX.png

[Georg]

There's no doubt that Thomas Piketty made some beautiful graphs that showed the failures of the Western economic systems. The questions come from statisticians who look at the underlying numbers and point out the 'apples and oranges' comparisons he does in order to make those numbers look good, and the number of statistics that appear to just have been made up out of whole cloth (which also magically support his preconceived conclusions, by amazing coincidence.) Even the New York Times squirms trying to support his conclusions, and the UK Financial Times takes a chainsaw to his numbers.

A simple example is shown right in the graph you display where it conflates real income and capital gains. Of *course* cap gains go up during an economic expansion. They also plummet during a decline, which of course is why the graph excludes the 2008 crash in real estate.

[Jordan179]

4906245

If you're truly a communist or even an anarchist that's exhilarating. That's exactly what has to happen before the great Glorious Revolution that makes everything better forever.

[zimmerwald1915]

4906321
No communist or anarchist except for the most depraved and psychopathic actually thinks like that. Cause in the meantime before the crisis point, not only are people hurting, but their very capacity to act together is eroded by the pressures of competition.

[Jordan179]

4906331

I was not aware that Marx and Engels were depraved and psychopathic! Because, you see both of them thought like that. Perhaps you should read about the concept of "total immiseration?"

[Jordan179]

4906331

Mind you, I don't think like that. But then again, I'm aware that the Glorious Revolution to come is purely imaginary and total immiseration usually precedes the collapse of the social order and its replacement by a worse one.

Then again, I have an advantage that Marx and Engels didn't have. They were looking forward to their glorious revolutions, while we are looking back at them.

[Spectrumancer]

"Eat the Rich"

[Jordan179]

4906348

... and once you've stolen their property, what next?

[iisaw]

4906318
Because black can be "proven" to be white, and up can be shown to be (statistically) down, such wankery gives the very convenient excuse to do nothing about problems that don't have a direct impact on the ruling classes. The cycle of study, debate, refutation, and re-analysis is a wonderful, endless distraction that saves a huge amount of money and effort that might otherwise be wasted on those people.

While pretty numbers and graphs carry the connotation of scientific legitimacy, isn't it interesting that anyone doing such an analysis always comes up with data that is perfectly in line with their ideology? Almost as if some invisible factor was at work... magic, maybe?

[Snowy]

4906318
As it happens, the linked article has a pair of graphs that are slightly different (the last period is 2009-2015 instead of -2012), one with capital gains included, and one with them excluded. While in most of the illustrated periods excluding capital gains makes things slightly better for the bottom 90%, it's not as much of a difference as you might think...and then there's the interesting case of 2001-2007.

i.imgur.com/gFw40O8.png
i.imgur.com/8gW2xTk.png

[Georg]

4906358 The shorter phrase is "Figures lie and liars figure." Prime examples are Michael Mann's 'Hockey Stick' graph debunking and Michael Bellesils's book 'Arming America'. In short, if the figures and charts line up really well with a particular political mindset and the researchers/publishers refuse to release their unedited, uncorrected, raw data, it's a fraud 98% of the time.

[iisaw]

4906401
Refutations are very often lies as well... and it's safe to assume they always are when they come from motivated sources. Data manipulation is easy, and biases drive statisticians more than math, if even subconsciously. Just keep messing around with the data until it looks like you want it to. So when you provide a right-wing think tank* driven article as any sort of evidence, I give it just as much weight as a bible verse.

----------------------
* The Heartland Institute dictates much of PSI's "work."

[zimmerwald1915]

4906338
I have, and if you had as well, you'd know that the tendency toward immiseration is at once not absolute, described but not welcomed, and like most social phenomena, both promising and dangerous. For example, as I said, it both heightens and renders futile competition.

[Jordan179]

4906437

In the fantasy world of Marxist theory immiseration is absolutely necessary for the Revolution. In the real world of Marxist revolution it's also necessary, to give the Great Leader the excuse to radicalize society, and begin his career of mass murder.

[horizon]

4906401

"Figures lie and liars figure."

Sure, which is why it's important to examine the actual evidence both sides are providing. The article you linked to in an effort to disprove Mann's "hockey stick" (which is written by a coworker of the defendant … but let's let the data speak for itself) uses this as its data:

i1.wp.com/principia-scientific.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/graphs.jpg?w=760&ssl=1

Note that Mann's is global temperatures, and Ball's is European temperatures. The best evidence being put forward by the people challenging Mann, right on the label, admits they're comparing apples and oranges!

Why is this important? Because regional data can be wildly different from global data:

s3.amazonaws.com/assets.realitydrop.org/images/medieval1.png
(source)

Over and over and over again, global reconstructions using different data sources have shown the same thing the "hockey stick" graph did:
d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/mg18925431.400-2_752.jpg
(source)

4906318

Even the New York Times squirms trying to support [Piketty's] conclusions …

What can we be comfortable in concluding about wealth inequality?

The evidence for one of Mr. Piketty’s key points is overwhelming: Income inequality has risen significantly in the last few decades in both the United States and Europe. Data on the concentration of wealth is less reliable, and that is the crux of the dispute. Even with wealth, though, we can be reasonably confident that it is becoming more concentrated in the hands of the top 1 percent in three of the four countries Mr. Piketty studies most closely (the United States, Sweden and France). It is British wealth inequality that is in dispute.

Over and over we see this pattern from people with ideological objections to mainstream science research: find some tiny little corner of the data set where they can raise what looks like a legitimate objection, and use that to spread FUD about the overall conclusions. I'm disappointed that you're doing that here.

Now, there are places where I have yet to be convinced there's the sort of overwhelming consensus we see for climate and inequality numbers. (I haven't come to any strong conclusions on gun control statistics, for example; I think there are plenty of good public policy arguments for heavy restrictions, but those aren't data-driven conclusions, aside from the raw number of American mass shootings. Let's not derail the thread to talk about it, though. EDIT: Forgot that you'd cited the gun debate yourself earlier. I apologize for calling it "derailing"; I just have no desire to step into an argument where the statistics are less clear.) And there are certainly places where the crazy fringe of the left is just as bad about going against scientific consensus. (Vaccine denialism and homeopathy, I'm looking particularly at you, but I also think nuclear power needs to be more widely developed, and I think that the problem with GMOs is not the technology itself but the ways in which that drives corporate monopoly and crop monoculture in the service of profit.) But in the fields we're talking about here, the data points so overwhelmingly one way, and the arguments of the opposing side are so transparently disingenuous, that both-sides-ism does the argument a dangerous disservice.

[Bad Horse]

I think that wealth inequality is in fact growing, but that graph doesn't show it, because you can't use averages for the comparison. Wealth has a power-law distribution, not a normal distribution. A graph like that would therefore result from a hypothetical economy in which the distribution of wealth didn't change at all (I'm using the word "distribution" literally here), but the population increased.