This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 1st, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The economics profession long ago moved on from Carl Marx and yet his works are assigned in college classrooms at very high rates.

Just not in economics department.

Phil Magnus with the American Institute for Economic Research details the attempt to restore Marx as a philosopher, if not as an economist,

and what it says about the rigor of the Academy.

It's a little bit stunning when you look at college course texts in the United States to see that Carl Marx continues to rank very highly.

Absolutely. He is almost always the first or second most assigned philosopher in the canon.

Is that the field in which he is cited?

Oh, he's actually across multiple fields,

almost everything except for economics,

which is the discipline that he made

his most significant contributions to.

Yeah, so and I think it's fair to say that you said contributions and

Carl Marx ought to be appreciated for contributions like alienated workers.

Right. He's a figure in the history of like that

He's a figure in the history of economic thought and worth studying but he also comes at the tail end of an age of economics the classical school of thought and is very much a creature of that school

especially his theory of value. What happens is he passes away in 1883 and

already the profession has moved in a different direction they've come to supersede him.

And it's at least fair to say that as you mentioned him coming at the end of the classical tradition is that he sort of represented the

culmination of that tradition in the sense that he was making use of theories that pretty much everybody agreed upon like

labor theory of value and took it about as far as it could go. That's pretty much

...