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Capital in the 21st Century: A Response to FT’s Data Problem
Professor Thomas Piketty has given a more detailed response to the Financial Times articles and blogs on his wealth inequality data in Capital in the 21st Century(here, here, here and here). He says it is “simply wrong” to suggest he made errors in his data.
There are a few things on which we agree. First, the source data on wealth inequality is poor. I have written that it is “sketchy” and Prof Piketty says it is “much less systematic than we have for income inequality”. Second, it would have been preferable for Prof Piketty to have used a more sophisticated averaging technique than a simple average of Britain, France and Sweden to derive an estimate for European wealth inequality. Third, the available data suggests a broad trend of reduction in wealth inequality during most of the 20th Century.
There are more aspects on which there remains disagreement. Prof Piketty does not explain the multiple missing data points in his data or tweaks to it; he explains transcription errors as deliberate adjustments to overcome discontinuities in data, but does not provide formulas or an explanation of why these undocumented adjustments should apply to only one data point in a time series; he does not explain why it is consistent to favour household surveys over estate tax records for the US but not the UK; nor why his UK series showing rising wealth inequality differs so materially from his source materials, which show falling UK wealth inequality in eight of the most recent nine decades.
Further debate on many of these items is difficult because Prof Piketty accepts he makes still undocumented adjustments to his data from his original sources, but says they are appropriate because any alternative would not be plausible. The sources he has appear to be secondary to Prof Piketty’s prior expectations of what the data needs to show.
I would urge those interested, who have the time, to read Prof Piketty’s technical annexes, the source data and the spreadsheets and decide whether his graphs on wealth concentration are a reasonable summary of the sources he used.
This is a fascinating and important debate.
From Banks To Startups
It was a Friday in the fall of 2004 and Umber Ahmad had been invited to read a poem at the wedding of one of her closest friends. She was planning to catch a 7 p.m. flight from New York to Toronto when a vice president at Morgan Stanley called her in. The client in a big merger deal needed work done over the weekend. A mergers and acquisitions specialist, Ahmad had no choice. She canceled the flight and started revising her analysis of the deal, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its June issue.
The Good Wife: “A Few Words”, Season 5, Episode 14
I had nothing. I used to have everything, but then in the blink of an eye everything turned into nothing. When you have nothing, you need to turn it into something – and fast. Having nothing is particularly difficult for women, and even more so with a woman with two kids and a husband in jail. So how did I opt back in?
I prepared by looking in a mirror. And what I saw was a desperate woman. That desperate woman shook every tree she knew to get an interview. And when those trees bore no fruit, I shook even more. Finally, a glimmer of hope. A firm said yes. I didn’t know much about the firm, except one thing: they were willing to interview me. It was the only interview I could still get, and I was thrilled to have it. But… the interview didn’t lead to anything. And I was back to nothing.
Fortunately, a second opportunity came my way.
The Good Wife: “A Few Words”, Season 5, Episode 14 Review from A.V.CLUB
What a stunning hour of television
How Much Paying for Your Mobile Messaging Services? WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat
So began the most lucrative two-year courtship in technology history, one in which admiration led to friendship and then, in a last-minute hurry, to an unprecedented transfer of wealth, all signed and sealed on the door of the welfare office Koum, 38, once haunted. Last month Facebook bought WhatsApp for $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in stock (8.5% of the company) plus $3 billion in restricted shares.
The deal cements Zuckerberg as tech’s new billionaire-maker. Koum, a shy but brilliant engineer who moved from Ukraine to the U.S. with nothing, will join the Facebook board and, after taxes, pocket $6.8 billion.
WhatsApp’s speed and deceptively simple interface could see it permanently trump its peers in the same way Facebook beat out rivals MySpace and Orkut, but its old-fashioned business model is unusual. Though other messaging apps like China’s WeChat, South Korea’s KakaoTalk and Canada’s Kik significantly trail WhatsApp in active users, they’re free and they sell ads, games and digital stickers that have seen them book heftier revenues.
WeChat, owned by state-backed Tencent and billionaire Ma Huateng, is letting some of its 270 million active users buy snacks in vending machines in the Beijing subway as an e-payments experiment. Analysts at Barclays estimate it to be worth $30 billion. Kakao is forecasting $200 million in revenue for 2013, deriving half of that from games. LINE, widely expected to IPO this year at a reported $8 billion valuation, brought in $336 million in 2013 revenue from a mix of selling digital stickers, in-app games and special accounts for advertisers.
Such extras are “junk,” says Acton. He fears stickers would draw WhatsApp into the content business; LINE’s series of bunny and bear sticker characters have already made appearances on TV shows in Japan. The unsexy mission of WhatsApp is reliability.
For now Koum is staying focused on the two priorities: keeping WhatsApp running and keeping users from going away. He can do so without the burden of building out the financial and legal infrastructure of a wholly independent company. “Fundamentally what we care about is building a product and great user experience,” he says. “[Mark] understands the network effect and he always talked about making the world more open and connected. Connected is where we come in.”
Facebook’s WhatsApp Acquisition Leaves Snapchat Hanging
With Facebook’s massive $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp earlier today, any possible marriage between Facebook and Snapchat appears to be dead.
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