Shout out to Karl Marx for correctly identifying many issues with what he called capitalism, but providing a compeltely inaccurate hypothesis as to the root cause of those issues.
IMO, Karl Marx’s main errors come down to 2 errors:
Overestimating drastically the amount of zero-sum/win-lose interactions in the economy. To be a bit more fair, the notion that positive sum/win-win economics could exist as a supermajority of all trades was likely very undeveloped by Marx’s time, and it only got started by at most 20-50 years in the west. This is a common error made across the political spectrum, but Karl Marx’s assumption that there had to be conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie probably reflects zero-sum assumptions on economics.
Way overestimating how much change/radicalism was necessary to distribute some of the profits of the new capitalism economy, closely related to the zero sum error, but also not realizing that the rich weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t just arbitrarily change society to fit their preferences.
Shout out to Karl Marx for correctly identifying many issues with what he called capitalism, but providing a compeltely inaccurate hypothesis as to the root cause of those issues.
IMO, Karl Marx’s main errors come down to 2 errors:
Overestimating drastically the amount of zero-sum/win-lose interactions in the economy. To be a bit more fair, the notion that positive sum/win-win economics could exist as a supermajority of all trades was likely very undeveloped by Marx’s time, and it only got started by at most 20-50 years in the west. This is a common error made across the political spectrum, but Karl Marx’s assumption that there had to be conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie probably reflects zero-sum assumptions on economics.
Way overestimating how much change/radicalism was necessary to distribute some of the profits of the new capitalism economy, closely related to the zero sum error, but also not realizing that the rich weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t just arbitrarily change society to fit their preferences.