Because #pikettyghazi isn’t a very good pun

Or is that a portmanteau?

However you hashtag it, the Internets are all a-twitter today over an FT takedown of economist-of-the-moment Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”

Piketty’s premise, that inequality is more the norm than the exception in capitalist economies, and that massive wealth disparity is again rising to levels not seen since before the Great Depression and WWII, is based on a broad synthesis of records and data collected by various sources over dozens of decades. The theme has resonated with many contemporary observers of the growing divide between rich and poor, but has annoyed the fanboys and fangirls of the invisible hand of the market.

The FT’s Chris Giles says Piketty has “got his sums wrong.” Giles writes that the book’s U.S. data contains mistakes and “unexplained entries in spreadsheets,” and accuses the French economist of cherry picking. He also says FT has “cleaned up” Piketty’s work and found that “European numbers do not show any tendency towards rising wealth inequality after 1970.”

That sounds pretty huge — like Reinhart and Rogoff huge — hence the Pikettyghazi hash-storm.

Except, as you might have heard, there is math, and then there is the math (or, since this is the FT, the maths).

“The good data we have on wealth inequality in the U.S. is broadly consistent with Piketty's story,” writes Matt Breunig at the public policy institution Demos. Breunig notes that some of Piketty’s older data is from multiple sources and that it all doesn’t blend well, although the preponderance of the evidence is consistent with Piketty’s conclusions. And now, Breunig adds, there is newer, better data, released since the publication of “Capital,” that is more accurate and “entirely consistent” with Piketty’s conclusions.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more exploration, it just means the FT’s “gotcha” moment is probably more like a “hmm, you think? let’s take another look.”

As Roosevelt Institute fellow and Al Jazeera America contributor Mike Konczal explained when asked about today’s econo-kerfuffle: