{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "ScholarlyArticle",
  "@id": "https://miklian.org/papers/right-diagnosis-wrong-prescriptions-testing-marx-hypotheses-21st-century-data#article",
  "headline": "Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescriptions? Testing Ten of Karl Marx's Hypotheses Against Twenty-First-Century Data",
  "name": "Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescriptions? Testing Ten of Karl Marx's Hypotheses Against Twenty-First-Century Data",
  "author": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "name": "Jason Miklian",
      "sameAs": [
        "https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1227-0975",
        "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=RHlevGEAAAAJ&hl=en",
        "https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jason-Miklian",
        "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q47107618",
        "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Miklian",
        "https://www.globe.uio.no/english/people/aca/jasontm/",
        "https://www.prio.org/people/5833",
        "https://jasonmiklian.com"
      ],
      "@id": "https://miklian.org/#person"
    }
  ],
  "datePublished": "2026",
  "isPartOf": {
    "@type": "Periodical",
    "name": "Under Review"
  },
  "url": "https://miklian.org/papers/right-diagnosis-wrong-prescriptions-testing-marx-hypotheses-21st-century-data",
  "abstract": "Karl Marx is one of the most cited, most debated, and least empirically tested social theorists of the modern era. His critics dismiss him as a failed prophet; his defenders treat his work as unfalsifiable critique. Neither camp has subjected his core claims to systematic modern econometric testing. This paper therefore translates ten of Marx's most influential hypotheses into falsifiable specifications and estimates them against 21st-century data from the Penn World Tables, World Development Indicators, SWIID, ACLED, V-Dem, MARPOR, and the American Time Use Survey, among other sources. The results divide cleanly: Marx's economic diagnostics (exploitation rising, labor's share falling, unemployment disciplining wages, automation generating alienation) hold up remarkably well. His political predictions (that material immiseration produces class consciousness, that the state functions as a direct instrument of capital, that structural crises generate revolutionary mobilization) do not. The analysis reveals how Marx was an astute diagnostician of capitalism's economic tendencies and a weaker theorist of its political consequences. This gap between conditions and consciousness suggests that institutional design, rather than historical inevitability, mediates the political consequences of economic exploitation. The implications are developed for development policy, with particular attention to platform labor governance, redistributive institutional design, and market concentration in emerging economies.",
  "keywords": [
    "Marxism",
    "econometric testing",
    "exploitation",
    "class consciousness",
    "inequality",
    "causal inference",
    "development economics",
    "political economy",
    "Global South",
    "institutional design"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "isAccessibleForFree": true,
  "inLanguage": "en"
}