The numbers are interesting, but I'm not as sure about the conclusion that this is specifically about Marx. If it were, why were views so different in the 1990s? In any case, it'd be interesting to see numbers from places that are neither the U.S. nor former Soviet-bloc countries, like South America or Japan (or, heck, Canada or Spain), to get more data points for the legacy-of-communism hypothesis.
I think it would also be interesting to take a bunch of these statements -- from all over the spectrum -- and ask, say, a thousand successful entrepreneurs whether they agreed or not. Sort of create an "attitude metric".
I'm not sure how useful it would be. If I understand correctly, the current consensus may be that you can be too smart for startups, ie, you think too much. But still, it would be an interesting exercise. I'd be curious as to what the answers were.
This is a borderline submission. I don't want to troll with political articles but I found the following quote worthy of interest over here:
... According to a 2009 survey of more than 26,000 people in 36 countries conducted by the Gallup Organization, only 31 percent of Americans agree with the statement that “entrepreneurs exploit other people’s work.” By contrast, 70 percent of Bulgarians, 72 percent of Estonians, 54 percent of Latvians, 79 percent of Lithuanians, 70 percent of Poles, 63 percent of Romanians, 73 percent of Slovenians, 73 percent of Slovakians, and 69 percent of Croats agree....
Many times when we talk about the Silicon Valley we talk about how the culture is so important because it fosters entrepreneurship. It's interesting to see some stats related to entrepreneurial culture in other places.
Actually, you know, in a lot of these places "enterpreneurs" do, in fact, exploit other people's work. After the fall of communism, formerly state owned enterprises, most of them nowhere near as worthless as they were made out to be, were sold for barely nothing to system cronies who then made obscene amounts of money when it turned out quite a few of these enterprises were, in fact quite profitable indeed. To which profitability the new owners contributed very little, if anything at all.
