Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) was an American economist, sociologist, and a well-known critic of capitalism. He founded the “institutionalist” school and applied an evolutionary, dynamic approach to the study of economic institutions. His critiques of capitalism include The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904.)
Born into a Norwegian immigrant family in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, Veblen grew up in an isolated farming community in Minnesota. He studied at Carleton College and Johns Hopkins University before receiving a PhD in philosophy from Yale.
Unable to find a university post, Veblen returned home and spent several unhappy years farming. He eventually gained a fellowship at Cornell that became the first in a series of academic appointments, frequent changes being necessitated by his unstable temperament tumultuous personal life. Also, he was an indifferent teacher with disdain for the university ritual of lecture and examination.
Veblen’s emotional distance from the mainstream U.S. culture made possible the unorthodox analysis of U.S. social and economic institutions in his major work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899.) He held that feudal social divisions continued into modern times, with the lower classes laboring to support the leisure class. The book became a classic text of U.S. economics, and with his other writings, it helped shape the terms of debate in his discipline.
Veblen also analyzed the scions of the so-called ‘Gilded Age’ spent uselessly, merely demonstrating that they could afford it. He coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to specify how the wealthy classes adopt specific fashions, emulating one another to reassure themselves of their belonging together.
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No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Travel
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Leisure
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man’s moral nature
—Thorstein Veblen
Invention is the mother of necessity.
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Necessity
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
—Thorstein Veblen
Labor wants also pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful – to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Pride
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
—Thorstein Veblen
It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.
—Thorstein Veblen
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