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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Is altruistic deception really necessary? Social activism and the free market - Less Wrong Discussion
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Nope. "67 out of 103 workers surveyed said they were less happy than they were 20 years ago" would be data. "Workers are getting unhappier" is not data. "Taking the number of job descriptions and their inflation-adjusted hourly wages from the 7 factories in table C, a log regression shows 0.8^(average $/hr) ~ number of job descriptions)" would be data. "The division of labor decreases wages" is not data. There is no data [was "there are no economic numbers"] in Marx's writings. He did not provide empirical evidence for any of his claims. (This is a common fault among intellectual descendants of Hegel.)
I agree that Marxism is a bad theory of history and of economics, but it simply isn't that case that Marx didn't rely on data in his work. His work (and, perhaps to an even greater extend, Engel's work) is chock-full of data that confirms his theory. This is actually one of the examples Popper uses to demonstrate the uselessness of data-theory fit as a demarcation criterion for science. Confirmation is simply too easy to come by (especially, when you are more or less avoiding places where disconfirming data is likely to show up).
Quote some. I took an entire class on Marx, and read hundreds of pages by him, and don't recall seeing any data. Nor can I find any, now, going through Selected Writings (ed. David McLellan). EDIT: See above.