Brad DeLong “writes”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/03/topic-there-is-a-growing-faction-in-the-academy-arguing-that-education-for-global-citizenship-requires-that-students.html :

bq. Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially… shows to the less developed the image of its own future…” Karl Marx was wrong.

Is it just me that thinks it is odd for DeLong to write this? It used to be a commonplace for people to say that Marx was wrong about this. But the people who said that he was wrong were typically _leftists_ , and their reason for saying it was the claim that Marx had failed to anticipate imperialism, the “development of underdevelopment” and all that stuff. So for them, Marx was wrong, because he thought that capitalism would develop economies everywhere, whereas they thought Lenin had shown that it would force some societies into a permanent state of underdevelopment. But DeLong is, by his own repeated admission, a “card carrying neoliberal”. And surely “card carrying neoliberals” believe in a future of globalized markets, urbanization, universal prosperity and (the cynics amongst us would add) strip malls and McDonalds. So am I missing something here? How do “card-carrying neoliberals” disagree with Marx on this point?