Best Selling Economics Writer Piketty Defends His Data After Paper's Criticism He Calls An 'Ambush'

The Financial Times has stirred up a good old-fashioned wonky media tempest with its critical analysis of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital In The Twenty-First Century and now the author is firing back, claiming that he was ambushed and not given proper time to respond, Newsweek reported on Tuesday.

The Times’ story alleged that Piketty’s data contained numerous “problems and errors” that called the entire book and its theses into question.

Newsweek is owned by the same company as IBTimes, the publisher of this report.

Piketty told Newsweek via email on Tuesday that Times economics editor Chris Giles, “didn’t give me proper time to respond (less than 24 hours) and most of all the mail he sent me did not include a large part of the material that they were going to publish. I maintain that there’s no error or flaw in my series.”

Newsweek said Giles told it that the paper did contact Piketty and he replied before the paper’s deadline. “He replied much quicker than the deadline,” Giles told the magazine, but he added that, “There was an amount of material to which Piketty did not reply.”