Ignoring the merits or not of the criticisms, I did find it interesting to compare how much effort the FT and Economist put into finding errors in this work and how much exposure they gave their findings, compared with the way they have largely ignored problems in other far more influential studies that were much more flawed.

For example Tol 2009, a flawed paper about the economic impacts of climate change which concluded that moderate warming would be economically beneficial[1]. That was cited (although not generally named) in numerous FT and Economist editorials and opinion pieces over the years yet as far as I'm aware they have not published anything about the recent correction. It was used as the basis for serious national and international policy and has contaminated many subsequent studies in the field. For years the author made regular appearances pushing the importance of the finding in western media. Yet even a fairly basic review of the paper would have spotted some of the errors (it was a meta-analysis and some of the values from other paper were copied incorrectly or had the sign reversed) i.e. even an FT intern could have spotted the mistakes. Updates to the paper indicate that the entire result was based on fitting a curve to a single outlier (a study by the same author) and additional studies since 2009 give a very different picture when included.

As far as I'm aware Piketty's work has had little to no real world impact as yet to government policy or widespread public opinion (I might be wrong of course). Any errors it contained, while worth correcting, don't seem like they would have an earth shattering impact worthy of front page exposure and double page spreads while retractions in more influential studies go unreported.

[1] More about that here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/2... and http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/tols-co...