Shattered Consensus. James Piereson

in their wealth and incomes has had nothing to do with tax avoidance or deflecting the tax burden onto the middle class.

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      Piketty’s estimates of wealth and income shares over the decades are probably as reliable and accurate as he or anyone else could make them, but even so they are estimates based on imperfect and inexact data often interpolated or extrapolated from entries in government records. This is especially true of his information on wealth, since governments have long maintained records on incomes (to collect taxes on incomes) but not on individual wealth. Following the publication of his book, many analysts challenged the accuracy of his data on the distribution of wealth in Great Britain and the United States. It will take some time to sort out these criticisms as other researchers attempt to replicate his analysis and as Piketty himself replies to his critics.

      Even where Piketty’s numbers may be accurate, they can still lead to faulty conclusions. As some critics have pointed out, he uses statistics on national income as denominators for his calculations of shares of income claimed by various groups of the population, but these figures exclude transfers from government such as Social Security payments, food stamps, rent supplements, and the like, which constitute a growing portion of incomes for many middle- and working-class people. If those transfers were included in the calculations, then the shares of income claimed by the top 1 percent or the top 10 percent would undoubtedly decline, and the shares of other groups would correspondingly increase.

      Leaving these controversies aside, and accepting Piketty’s data as valid for the time being, there are nevertheless good reasons to question his basic conclusions about capitalism in the twentieth century. He claims that inequality has increased since 1980, especially in the United States and Great Britain, that this kind of inequality is built into the nature of capitalism, and that it has been exacerbated by new tax policies that have cut the levies on high incomes and great wealth. These claims are greatly exaggerated.