I've not looked at any of this, and am therefore not implying Piketty might be a fraud like Michael Bellesiles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America), but I'll note that many of the major scholars who took the latter down realized in seconds he was a fraud. Because they'd done relevant original source based research that his claimed research directly contradicted, especially non-RKBA related scholars who were simply intimately familiar with early American probate records. And then there was the smoking gun of records lost in the San Francisco earthquake and fire....
I've seen a lot of bogus stuff put out over the decades that's taken very little time to debunk. With the availability of info on the net, plus of course in this case the FT having significant internal resources, the timeline is hardly out of the question.
Note that nominally honest researchers are well known to make mistakes that follow their prejudices, I saw a lot of this in the '80s arguments against ballistic missile defense. They compute a result, but don't subject it to the critical analysis they would of something that goes against the grain, and don't give political opponents a chance to double check their work. And then e.g. end up publishing a series of articles in Scientific American that successively have fewer and fewer claims about how it's "impossible".
I've seen a lot of bogus stuff put out over the decades that's taken very little time to debunk. With the availability of info on the net, plus of course in this case the FT having significant internal resources, the timeline is hardly out of the question.
Note that nominally honest researchers are well known to make mistakes that follow their prejudices, I saw a lot of this in the '80s arguments against ballistic missile defense. They compute a result, but don't subject it to the critical analysis they would of something that goes against the grain, and don't give political opponents a chance to double check their work. And then e.g. end up publishing a series of articles in Scientific American that successively have fewer and fewer claims about how it's "impossible".