Karl Marx was wrong about pretty much everything. I don’t just mean wrong in the broad moral sense — although, with a hundred million deaths carried out in his name, he has a good claim to be reckoned the greatest incitement to violence in human history. No, I mean wrong in the literal sense that every prediction he made failed to come true — except one.

Marx saw himself as a scientist rather than an ideologue. His followers treated his turgid writings not as a series of opinions, but as a catalogue of empirical truths. Yet his record as a forecaster could not have been worse.