Piketty in R markdown
simplystatistics.org
simplystatistics.org
Eight, seems to me. Agreed on the Excel behaviour.
Also, the blog post states: "ticks on the x-axis are separated by 20, 50, 43, 37, 20, 20, and 22 years."
The first two ticks are 1700 and 1820, so 120 years. (Noticed because stretching the left side is the biggest chart change shown.)
The validity of the numbers depends on more than just the maths though, do you guys plan on going through the sources as well?
This book has generated a lot of discussion, and so I went into it with my controversy-goggles strapped on. This is absolutely not required, as the book (based on what the author says he will cover and has covered so far, anyways) is more of a history and description of capital than political narrative or policy-making.
Still I find it weird to be downvoted for a suggestion. :/
[edit] removed non relevant comment.
That is, do we really care about what the FT says? To me it's similar to the Washington Times making a statement about a book on evolution.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America as an example why questioning is necessary.
(As it happens, I don't believe any of the critiques so far have undermined his main results.)
Finally, your analogy is poorly informed and too cute by half.
I guess I have a bias against editorialists and a bias toward scientists, researchers, historians.
Furthermore, I am more surprised that more editorialists haven't slammed the book. I mean, given the book's subject and conclusions, I would have expected an avalanche of criticism, by now.
Imagine a Wikipedia of science, logic, and reasoning. Instead of summarizing consensus, you instead build a vast database of primary facts, data, and then on top of it formalize your assumptions and arguments so that it is plain to see how conclusions follow -- or don't -- from the bare facts and reasonable assumptions. You could build almost math-like proofs, with all arguments and counterarguments categorized and catalogued.
You could build a verifiable consensus. Given two different schools of thought, for instance, two different schools of economics, you could reduce each to the set of assumptions or faulty logic that distinguishes them. Some economists believe one thing to be true, some another, and they argue with one another and some people are convinced and some people aren't. Where does the difference arise? Is there a faulty chain of reasoning underlying one (or both!) of them, or is there a difference in the assumptions each group makes? If so, is one of these assumptions unfounded, or can it be tested and verified so that the assumptions that go into each school can be reconciled along with the conclusions that follow from them?
I think we have an opportunity, not to be smarter or more informed than the experts in their different fields, but to have each argument once, online, crowd-sourced, rather than having the same arguments crop up again and again and again between individual experts arguing with each other. We can bring organization and permanence.
After about 100 years of trying economics this way, there is still nothing close to a model that has reliable predictive power as we would expect with other natural sciences using the hypothetico-deductive method. I advocate instead the axiomatic-deductive method of the Austrian School. If you like, here is more on why what you want to do doesn't work from von Mises: http://mises.org/daily/3540