You know your profession is a complete shitshow when you use math to attempt to disprove something that is obviously occurring.

Unfortunately, all of the focus on Piketty is a net negative because if conservatives and neoliberals manage to convince everyone that Piketty is wrong (which is likely; they own nearly all the media), then that will be in most people’s minds a de facto refutation of the actuality of the startling increase in inequality.

So when “economists” disprove using poor math something that is completely obvious, I wonder how anyone in that field is allowed even to speak. Because inequality is obviously rising – every statistic shows this – the question is only the mechanism.

One of the reasons I have problems with much of mathematical modeling is that in most fields it’s just as social as anything else: in other words, it is almost always used to justify existing prejudices and the status quo, not to discover anything.