> He really was not. He was great at politics.
Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position").
But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for.
Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician.
Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader.
With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics.
> Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously.
The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence.
Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
