Most people already knew what Pikkety concluded, they just didn't have evidence for it. Now we do and until someone shows better evidence it's hard to claim Piketty is making mistakes without most probably being politically motivated to do so.
His solution on the other hand was an unnecessary but understandable addition to the book.
And I say this as a European style liberal.
Precisely. The media and punditry love to emphasize that economic models didn't see this or that crash, or can't explain this or that phenomena. Yet this guy writes an incredibly well researched, deep book, and the same people pile on because his conclusions don't model reality to a tee. Economics doesn't work that way. All researchers can do is attempt to get incrementally closer to "the truth".
We're going through some interesting times of awareness of wealth inequality globally, so both the "socialist" side and "capitalist" side have exaggerated his conclusions, and thus the guy can't stay out of the news.
His conclusions are arguable, and can even be dismissed. But the data he collected and organized can and should be taken seriously and reworked. Yes, revised, treated with different assumptions in mind. But dismiss his whole work because he might be wrong on his final politic suggestions is a disservice to the science (no matter how small amount of science there is in Economics).
If you want to make Economics learn some things from hard sciences, you should take Piketty's data seriously.
Not in the least because he himself appears to be very open to criticism, as a proper scientist should be.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9ce1a54-e281-11e3-89fd-00144feabd...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/upshot/did-piketty-get-his...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/alan-reynolds-why-pikettys-wealt...
It's interesting to see how many people so dearly want his assertions to be true.
Those claims have been discussed here before and they don't change anything substantial.