Karl Marx’s malady

This news item in The Economics says that Steve Jobs realized that "Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba (the guru he was seeking, who died before they could meet) put together" 


I remember two things after reading this news item:


A recent interesting article "Marx to Market" by Peter Coy. The opening para of article is worth to ponder over:

• Society generally moves on from its mistakes. Doctors no longer drain blood from patients. Aviators don’t try to fly by strapping wings to their arms. Nobody still thinks that slavery is a good idea. Karl Marx, though, appears to be an exception to the rule of live and learn. Marx’s most famous predictions failed; there has been no dictatorship of the proletariat, nor has the state withered away. His followers included some of the 20th century’s worst mass murderers: Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Yet the gloomy, combative philosopher seems to find adherents in each new generation of tyrants and dreamers.

I strongly recommend to read the full article.

The other thing I remember is that in the great article "No History of Ideas, Please, We're Economists", Mark Blaug said:

• “How can we possibly forget, or even pretend to forget, modern economics when we read Karl Marx? Why did the poor fellow try to attribute the value of the product to a single input, labor, without knowing anything about marginal productivity? One might well talk to a psychoanalyst about one’s childhood while pretending that amnesia occurred at puberty.”