Mason Gaffney wrote: "A weakness in some of the postings herein, thus far, has been casual empiricism run riot. In a scatter of points you can always find pairs that, taken separately, run against the regression line derived from the whole scatter, and James has done that (so, perhaps, have some of his antagonists, but I just read James recently). Miller looks at the whole data set in England." I'd like to refer Mason back to reading all of the posts on income inequality and growth to learn what he appears to me to be missing. How can he tell the "weakness in some of the postings" when he says he just read mine [James's] recently? Secondly, I was using data for the world published in Meier and Rauch, Leading Issues in Economic Development (2005) and World Development Report (2003) to argue my points. I don't think "the whole data set in England" is a good substitute for the world data from the above two sources. Thirdly, I have been a student of development economics and studied the data long enough, not to be unduly impressed by what an "Epidemiologist in high standing" writes in the Lancet. Lastly, I think Mason will be more helpful to this discussion if he studied the data and offered a reasoned explanation or argument in support of his viewpoint than what he has so far done. James Ahiakpor