Thomas Piketty’s work on income inequality is much cited and discussed; he is considered one of the most influential living economists. I’ve seen his name crop up a lot recently, especially in articles about the economy after coronavirus. However, there’s just one problem: journalists can’t seem to resist mentioning that he’s the “French economist Thomas Piketty”.

The fact that Piketty is French doesn’t particularly matter to most articles that introduce him this way: granted some of his work focused on the French economy and most of his books and articles were published in French before English translations, but this rarely affects the context.

For a while I had a hunch that Piketty was introduced more frequently by his nationality than other economists, so I collected data on the matter. Using a list of the “15 most influential living economists” from The Economist in 2014, I used Google search result counts for the exact phrase “Nationality economist Person” to determine overall ratios.¹ I have also included Adam Smith, Keynes, and Marx for reference.

Shiller, Piketty, and Keynes are clear outliers. The dominance of Americans both in the list and in the field perhaps suggests that economists are considered American by default by most journalists (and perhaps readers too). Nevertheless, the bottom half of the list comprises those of dual and other nationality. The inclusion of a more international pool of economists might reveal a different trend, although we would expect significantly fewer references to them.

Next, I restricted my search to references to these economists on The Economist’s own website. This ought to reduce false positives in the data too, as references to these names are more likely to be to the economists rather than other individuals of the same name. I suspected that The Economist was particularly prone to this trend.

Amongst Economist articles Piketty is an even more extreme outlier. I’ve found no evidence in The Economist Style Guide that the publication requires the use of nationality or profession when introducing individuals, and the data show this is true of other economists. In conclusion, I’ve absolutely no idea why the newspaper so frequently introduces him as the “French economist Thomas Piketty”, but they certainly refer to his nationality and occupation a great deal more than they do of his peers.