all a farce

Is it telling that Paul Samuelson, the so-dubbed “last of the great general economists”, has most visibly in this picture (courtesy of The Economist) books on Karl Marx?

Was there value to be found in Marx’s superbly detailed, and surprisingly consistent conclusions about British industrialisation?

Was such knowledge important in modeling, from fundamentals, the workings of an industrial economy?

Was there a time when economics went beyond vector auto-regression?

I think so.

Then again, perhaps “Karl Marx” is just more commonly done in big letters on the sides of books.

Really, both are equally plausible.