Hello I found this interesting and asked my oldest friend and fellow journalist and writer economist Richard Parker from Harvard to comment — Richard is Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Fellow of the Shorenstein Center. He cofounded the magazine Mother Jones as well as Investigative Reporters & Editors, and chairs the editorial board of The Nation.

There’s been a challenge from the start to Piketty’s numbers involving his inclusion of housing in his “capital” calculations. Sympathetic critics have simply said that one can reasonably count as “wealth” the sum of housing and financial assets.

That said, this is really a little sneak attack on Piketty from the libertarian right. The kid’s point about the role of housing is correct as far as it goes, but doesn’t back out home ownership (including second, third, etc. homes) by the 1%, even 5%, to count it as part of THEIR “wealth”.

There’s a second issue, which is the accuracy of various non-personal holding forms — offshore accounts, trusts, etc. — which are poorly captured in standard wealth studies. Zucman and others think there’s at least $20 Trillion involved, and while by no means all American, suggests how understated current wealth estimates of the richest really may be.