the modern university education lacks exactly the same thing that your 1 paragraph of letters does – nuance. "Anything else is …" is the crap we need to see less of, if we are to respect academic research and publishing at all.

> the modern university education lacks exactly the same thing that your 1 paragraph of letters does – nuance

Where do you get that? My experience is very much the opposite. What I see from university educations is far more nuanced and sophisticated than what I see anywhere else - far beyond HN, fwiw.

I’m not even going to take a specific stand or call out the specific things that make me loose hope for the future. But if you don’t notice that activism and books praising activism (as opposed to seeking knowledge and revealing truth, or even just having deep knowledge of craft, like medicine), are a large part of modern academia, then we live in two different worlds.

How do you define activism? I think activism is very much about the truth - it's a means of putting a challenging truth on the agenda when otherwise it would be ignored.

MLK said that people don't change their minds (maybe not exactly his term) in the absence of tension. There's plenty of history that they will ignore things for generations if they can. Look at what's happening with climate change, for example - and instead of acting to stop the problem, many in power are acting to deny it and to suppress anyone who points out out.

> if you don’t notice that activism and books praising activism (as opposed to seeking knowledge and revealing truth, or even just having deep knowledge of craft, like medicine), are a large part of modern academia

What in academia do you have experience with? Any at all?

which modern intellectual supports Marx these days?

I suspect they were just not clear about what they meant specifically. Distinct from political or economic marxism, dialectical materialism is a thoroughly mainstream technique in history and the philosophy of science and certainly other disciplines as well.

// It’s just so clear ...

As one of the many millions of people that moved to the west to (successfully) elevate our lives compared to every place where Marxism has been attempted -- what?

// ... based on the literature

Oh, lol. People can't eat "literature."

If a science shows Marxism works it casts doubt on that area of science not rigor on Marxism.

>But if mainstream economic theory is anything close to being correct, denying Marx was correct is like denying gravity. It’s just so clear based on the literature that the rate of return on investment exceeds the growth of the real economy.

Putting aside that I quite like Marx and Marxism as objects of study, Pikkety's "r > g" is simply not any of Marx's empirical theses in Capital. You are perhaps thinking of the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall", which many people considered to hold empirically in the 19th century but which came into greater dispute through the 20th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...