Thorstein Veblen

The Theory of the Leisure Class

by Thorstein Veblen  · 10 Oct 2007  · 395pp  · 118,446 words

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Veblen, Thorstein, 1857–1929 The theory of the leisure class / Thorstein Veblen; edited with an Introduction and notes by Martha Banta. p. cm. — (Oxford world’s classics) Originally published: New York : Macmillan, 1899. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN

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the material in this Oxford World’s Classics ebook. Use the asterisks (*) throughout the text to access the hyperlinked Explanatory Notes. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS THORSTEIN VEBLEN The Theory of the Leisure Class Edited with an Introduction and Notes by MARTHA BANTA OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

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THORSTEIN VEBLEN was born in 1857 on the Wisconsin frontier, the sixth of twelve children of Thomas and Kari Veblen who emigrated from Norway in 1847. At

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all the implications of Veblen’s classic study. Perhaps their quandary is caused by the fact, as one observer has stated, ‘no one remotely like Thorstein Veblen can ever be expected to appear again’.2 Certain economists and sociologists prefer to look away from this volume, finding themselves more at home with

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? Neither was the case. Veblen’s life history provides its own compelling narrative of how not to succeed in the conventional ways of the world. Thorstein Veblen was born in 1857 of Norwegian immigrant parents on the Wisconsin frontier, the sixth of twelve children. He would die in seclusion in the mountains

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be frightening but Americans were encouraged to feel proud of social systems that bred men capable of making vast amounts of money hand over fist. Thorstein Veblen did not concur that the practice of greed is a good thing under any guise. The ways of Wall Street and those of the jungle

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Veblen shaped The Theory of the Leisure Class there is the nature of the man who wrote this all-important analysis of our society. Although Thorstein Veblen can be viewed as ‘a character’, more to the point is the kind of ‘character’ he possessed. Perhaps it is John Dos Passos who best

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take over the original plates, which were used for subsequent reprints. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Biography Diggins, John F., Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton, 1999). Dos Passos, John, The Bitter Drink: A Biography of Thorstein Veblen (San Francisco, 1939). Background Aaron, Daniel, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (Oxford, 1951

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York, 1907). James, William, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890). Louca, Francisco, and Perlman, Mark (eds.), Is Economics an Evolutionary Science? The Legacy of Thorstein Veblen (Cheltenham, 2000). Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991). Silk, Leonard Solomon, Veblen: A Play in Three Acts (New York, 1966). Tilman

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, Rick (ed.), A Veblen Treasury: From Leisure Class to War, Peace, and Capitalism (Armonk, NY, 2003). ——and Simich, J. L. (eds.), Thorstein Veblen: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1985). Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982). Critical Studies Banta, Martha

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, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, 1993). Brown, Doug (ed.), Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Century: A Commemoration of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899–1999) (Cheltenham, 1998). Daugert, Stanley Matthew, The Philosophy of

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Thorstein Veblen (New York, 2002). Diggins, John F., The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (New York, 1978). Dorfman, Joseph, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1961). Dowd, Douglas F. (ed.), Thorstein Veblen, A Critical Reappraisal: Lectures and Essays Commemorating The Hundredth Anniversary of

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Veblen’s Birth (Ithaca, NY, 1958). Eby, Clare Virginia, Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia, Mo., 1998). Mestrovic, Stjepan Gabriel, Thorstein Veblen on Culture and Society (London, 2003). Patsouras, Louis

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, Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life (Montreal, 2004). Riesman, David, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York, 1953). Rosenberg, Bernard, The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal (Washington

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, DC, 1956). Schneider, Louis, The Freudian Psychology and Veblen’s Social Theory (New York, 1948). Seckler, David, Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics (Boulder, Colo., 1975). Splindler, Michael, Veblen & Modern America: Revolutionary Iconoclast (London, 2002). Tilman, Rick

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, The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues (Westport, Conn., 1996). ——Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891–1963: Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives (Princeton, 1992). Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics Adams, Henry, The Education

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… Audet: ‘now neglected faith and peace, and ancient honour and shame, dares to return’ (Horace, ‘Carmen Saeculare’). 1 Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1961), 422. 2 Bernard Rosenberg, Thorstein Veblen (New York, 1963), 1. It is heady to realize that dealing with Veblen’s career prompts paying attention to the

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Mumford, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Charles S. Peirce, George Mead, and John Dewey. Rick Tilman’s The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues (Westport, Conn., 1996) makes this point very well, since ‘legacy’ is the key word when it comes to assessing Veblen’s influence over

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psychology, physiology, political science, and anthropology. 3 The following comments from the Yale Review and the Journal of Political Economy are cited in Dorfman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America, 191–2. 4 Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’ (1941), cited in Rick Tilman and Jo Lo Simich (eds

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.), Thorstein Veblen: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1985), 50. 5 After Veblen’s death in 1929, a tabulation of the sales of his ten books over his lifetime

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to a friend, ‘The president doesn’t approve of my domestic arrangements; nor do I.’ From John Dos Passos, The Bitter Drink: A Biography of Thorstein Veblen (San Francisco, 1939), 12. 9 The original Dial was the voice for the Transcendentalists, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson between 1840 and

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: Immigrant Pioneers from Valdris. It corrects the view that the Veblens lived a raw frontier life advanced by Joseph Dorfman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America. Tilman’s The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen also demonstrates that Veblen’s father, Thomas, was hardly like a Thomas Lincoln whose son was left to elevate his

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library contained the works of Darwin, Spencer, Ricardo, Marx, and also Shakespeare, Swift, Dante, Carlyle, Balzac, Shaw, Hardy, Knut Hamsun, and Jack London. 34 Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, 175. Macmillan had so little faith in the book’s commercial prospects Veblen was obliged to put up a guarantee. 35 See

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Ward in Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America, 194, and Henderson in Tilman and Simich (eds.), Veblen: Reference Guide, 436–40. H. L. Mencken, himself a famous stylist of a

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy  · 12 May 2025  · 774pp  · 238,244 words

barriers to economic development facing postcolonial nations. Of the individuals profiled, some led the conventional lives of academics, although their thinking was far from conventional. (Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, and Stuart Hall are examples.) Others were gentlemen scholars (William Thompson and Thomas Carlyle); journalist-authors (Henry George, John Hobson

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the United States and other countries, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of huge industrial combines and a spendthrift plutocracy, which Thorstein Veblen, for one, subjected to merciless inspection. This period also saw the rise of imperialism, which Vladimir Lenin famously described as the highest stage of capitalism

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the centuries. Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand.”80 11 “The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent” Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry It was Mark Twain and his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner, in their 1873 novel The Gilded Age, who gave a

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label to an American era characterized by political corruption and vulgar displays of wealth.1 And it was the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, who coined some of the most memorable terms to describe the sociology of that era

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level of wealth inequality would be higher, it pointed out.10 To be sure, this conclusion wouldn’t have come as news to Henry George, Thorstein Veblen, or Rosa Luxemburg. On both sides of the Atlantic, socialists and left-liberals had long tied the rise of monopolies, trusts, and other big capitalist

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, money and credit, international economics, and the history of economic thought. His teachers included two eminent American economists: Herbert J. Davenport, a former student of Thorstein Veblen, and Edwin Seligman, an expert on public finance who was also a progressive activist and a former president of the Society for Ethical Culture. Seligman

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and maintain the artisans and their families and so forms a complete cycle with the locally available reeds which constitute the raw materials.”35 Echoing Thorstein Veblen, Kumarappa also argued that in modern societies a great deal of consumption was driven by fashion and social pressures rather than genuine need. “For a

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.   George, Progress and Poverty, 480–81. 78.   George, Progress and Poverty, 495. 79.   George, Progress and Poverty, 473. 80.   George, Progress and Poverty, 495. 11. Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry   1.   Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, CT: American Publishing, 1873), https

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, Forerunner of Progressivism, 1880–1901,” The Mississippi Valley History Review 37, no. 4 (March 1951), 599–624.   9.   For Veblen’s life, see Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking Press, 1934); and Charles Camic, Veblen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 10.   Dorfman, Veblen and His America, 56

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.   Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (July 1901), 67–89. 22.   Thorstein Veblen, “Review of Misère de la Philosophie by Karl Marx, and of Socialisme et Science Positive by Enrico Ferri,” Journal of Political Economy 5, no. 1

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.org/stable/1817518?seq=4, reprinted in Charles Camic and Geoffrey M. Hodgson, eds., The Essential Writings of Thorstein Veblen (New York: Routledge, 2011); see also Emilie J. Raymer, “A Man of His Time: Thorstein Veblen and the University of Chicago Darwinists,” Journal of the History of Biology 46 (2013), 669–98. 23.   Veblen

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Consumers Guide,” no. 104, https://www.google.com/books/edition/1897_Sears_Roebuck_Co_Catalogue/_gdrCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA1&printsec=frontcover. 28.   Thorstein Veblen, “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress,” The Popular Science Monthly, no. 46 (1894), 198–205, http://www.modetheorie.de/fileadmin/Texte/v/Veblen-The

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His Followers II: The Later Marxism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 21, no. 1 (February 1907), 299–322, 304; see also Camic, Veblen, 319. 30.   Thorstein Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 12, no. 4 (July 1898), 373–97. 31.   Camic, Veblen, 274. 32.   Camic

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, Veblen, 274. 33.   Camic, Veblen, 298. 34.   Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10. 35.   Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 21. 36.   Veblen, Theory of

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,” 432. 60.   Cummings, “Theory of the Leisure Class,” 441, 443. 61.   Camic, Veblen, 10–11. 62.   Cummings, “Theory of the Leisure Class,” 443–44. 63.   Thorstein Veblen, “Mr. Cummings’s Strictures on ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class,’” The Journal of Political Economy 8, no. 1 (December 1899), 106–17. 64.   Camic

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, Veblen, 321–22. 65.   Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904; 2016 reprint), 18. 66.   Veblen, Theory of Business Enterprise, 18–19. 67.   Veblen

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Laws of Motion 10. “We must make land common property”: Henry George’s Moral Crusade 11. “The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent”: Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry 12. “A particularly crude form of capitalism”: John Hobson’s Theory of Imperialism 13. “Capital knows no other solution to

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

of Stanislaw Ulam. Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909–1984): Polish American mathematician and protégé of John von Neumann. Oswald Veblen (1880–1960): American mathematician, nephew of Thorstein Veblen, and first professor appointed to the IAS in 1932. Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963): Hungarian American aerodynamicist, founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). John von

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college, including their four daughters and two subsequently distinguished sons. Andrew Veblen became a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa, while Thorstein Veblen, born in 1857, became an influential social theorist, best known for coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure

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Class. Thorstein Veblen had a Darwinian eye, sharpened by growing up on the edge of the wilderness, for the coevolution of corporations, financial instruments, and machines. Although respected

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against the German war machine, but by the time the Proving Ground was operational, the war in Europe was drawing to a close. According to Thorstein Veblen, the United States had entered the war, belatedly, only to ensure that the transnational interests of the industrialists would be protected against any social upheavals

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to “the Institute for Advanced Salaries,” while Princeton University graduate students referred to “the Institute for Advanced Lunch.” The Institute was the unacknowledged realization of Thorstein Veblen’s original call (in 1918) for “a freely endowed central establishment where teachers and students of all nationalities, including Americans with the rest, may pursue

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Princeton and its Institutions (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1879) vol. 1, p. 36. THREE: VEBLEN’S CIRCLE 1. Mrs. R. H. Fisher, in Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York: Viking, 1934), p. 504. 2. Herman Goldstine, interview with Albert Tucker and Frederik Nebeker, March 22, 1985, The Princeton Mathematics

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. 616 (Jan. 28, 1933): 54; Flexner, I Remember, p. 375; ibid., pp. 377–78; Frank Aydelotte to Herbert H. Maass, June 15, 1945, IAS. 43. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918), p. 45. 44. Flexner, I Remember, pp. 361 and 375. 45. Abraham Flexner to

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that had changed hands only twice since the ownership of William Penn. (Abraham Flexner, I Remember [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940]) Oswald Veblen, nephew of Thorstein Veblen (who coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class), was a topologist, geometer, ballistician, and outdoorsman who, as a

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

by Mark Skousen  · 22 Dec 2006  · 330pp  · 77,729 words

this era were John Bates Clark at Columbia University, Frank A. Fetter at Cornell and Princeton, Richard T. Ely at the University of Wisconsin, and Thorstein Veblen, who established the institutional school of economics. It would be fair to say that the Americans were more remodelers than architects of a new building

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was heavily criticized by fellow economists, who made the allegation that "neoclassical economics was essentially an apologetic for the existing economic order" (Stigler 1941, 297). Thorstein Veblen, in particular, used Clark as a foil in his diatribes against the prevailing economic system. Yet Clark's application of the marginality principle to labor

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listeners, including George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Webb, to become socialists. See Skousen (2001, 229-30). They are the American Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and the German Max Weber (1864-1920). Thorstein Veblen: The Voice of Dissent Veblen was the principal faultfinder and censor of the new theoretical capitalism. Having taught at ten institutions

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gloomy view of capitalism transpired during the Roaring Twenties, when American consumers were making tremendous advances. Max Weber: A Spirited Defense of "Rational" Capitalism Fortunately, Thorstein Veblen was not the only social commentator on capitalism at the turn of the century. His chief antagonist came from across the Atlantic—the German sociologist

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in the spirit of Adam Smith than Veblen. As John Patrick Diggins states, "No two social theorists could be more intellectually and temperamentally opposed than Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber" (1999, 111). Both Veblen and Weber were obsessed with the meaning of contemporary industrial society—the issues of power, management, and surplus

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United States, among others, it resurrected Smith and transformed him into a whole new classical man. Despite efforts to renounce the new capitalist model by Thorstein Veblen and other institutionalists, the critics were effectively countered, especially by Max Weber. The neoclassical paradigm stood tall, ready to make contributions to the new scientific

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: Macmillan. Diggins, John Patrick. 1996. Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Basic Books. . 1999. Thorstein Veblen, Theorist of the Leisure Class. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dorfman, Joseph. 1934. Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Downs, Robert B. 1983. Books That Changed the World. 2d ed

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. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Johnson, Elizabeth, and Harry G. Johnson. 1978. The Shadow of Keynes. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jorgensen, Elizabeth, and Henry Jorgensen. 1999. Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand. Armonk, NY: M.E. Shaipe. Jouvenel, Beitrand de. 1999. Economics and the Good Life: Essays on Political Economy, ed. Dennis Hale and Marc

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett  · 14 May 2017  · 550pp  · 89,316 words

very greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability. —Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) In the 1920s, Muriel Bristol attended a summer’s afternoon tea party in Cambridge, UK. A number of

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.5 THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS Perhaps no one captured and articulated the social significance of consumption better than the social critic and economist Thorstein Veblen. Written in the late 1800s, Veblen’s polemic treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class is the defining text that precisely expresses the relationship between

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, the fashionable behaviour. Even their vices and follies are fashionable. —Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790) In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen observed that conspicuous consumption was also practiced among those outside of the rich, or what he called the “impecunious classes.” These poorer strata of society

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or just on average with the rest of the country on social memberships. CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION IN CITIES Mills, like his contemporary John Kenneth Galbraith, and Thorstein Veblen before, was concerned about the social ramifications of concentrated wealth and its various signals. The pernicious and less obvious examples are those of secret social

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to engage in conspicuous production, conspicuous leisure, and inconspicuous consumption, all of which produce much greater class stratification effects than the acquisition of material goods. Thorstein Veblen believed that conspicuous leisure would decline while conspicuous consumption would increase at a rapid pace among the rich and nouveau riche. He could not have

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boutiques of Paris. The limitations of my landscape are due to the data at hand, but the expanse of these phenomena is in evidence worldwide. Thorstein Veblen’s view of consumption in the nineteenth century still applies today, but society and class are far more complicated. Many of us have access to

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the new consumer (1st ed.). New York: Basic Books. Scott, A. (2005). Hollywood: The place, the industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Seckler, D. W. (1975). Thorstein Veblen and the institutionalists: A study in the social philosophy of economics. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press. Second wind. (2014, June 14). Economist: Schumpeter. Retrieved from

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business

by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan  · 28 Jan 2020  · 218pp  · 62,889 words

to the ideas of a school of thought, often ignored nowadays, known as the old institutional economics (OIE). Most famously associated with the works of Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, this body of scholarship developed in the early years of the twentieth century in the USA, a time when American capitalism

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have found a euphemism for ‘sabotage’, then? A less offensive term to describe a core technique of moneymaking in finance? We suggest not. It was Thorstein Veblen, a father of an important school of thought in economics,1 who first introduced sabotage as a core economic concept. ‘Sabotage,’ he noted, ‘is a

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rivals or to secure their own advantage.3 Veblen believed that in this expanded meaning the term ‘sabotage’ captured an important dimension of modern business. Thorstein Veblen is a controversial figure in the history of economic thought. His writing style is archaic, quite convoluted and always political. His legacy is mostly associated

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theories are rarely taught in university programmes; global search engines yield many more results for ‘John Maynard Keynes’ and ‘John Commons’ than they do for ‘Thorstein Veblen’. Yet in the wake of the 2007–9 crisis, and in light of the revelations of the Panama and Paradise dossiers and the like, one

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, innovating new products if he sees a profit to doing so, strategically misrepresenting his private information if this is profitable.’10 THE BUSINESS WORLD OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN So, how do businesses make money in competitive markets? Through sabotage, was a bold answer Veblen offered to a question that few had asked in

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competition and unscrupulous predatory tactics.’12 In short, what the captains of industry were experts in was sabotage. KNOWLEDGE, POWER AND OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY Thorstein Veblen was not a friend of the financial industry. If he was critical of the new capitalists of his day generally, he was specifically hostile to

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crisis: BCG’, 2 March 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-banks-fines/banks-paid-321-billion-in-fines-since-financial-crisis-bcg-idUSKBN1692Y2. Riesman, D., Thorstein Veblen, Transaction Publishers, 1953. Robinson, E., and M. Montijano, ‘Santander’s Ana Botin has something to prove’, Bloomberg, 23 November 2015, www.bloomberg.com/news/features

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. Sabotage in the Financial System 1. The school is known as evolutionary economics or old institutional economics. It is associated primarily with the works of Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons. For broad discussion of the old school of evolutionary economics see: J. Hodgson, The Evolution of Institutional Economics, Routledge, 2004, and

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

by Frank Trentmann  · 1 Dec 2015  · 1,213pp  · 376,284 words

the ancients, but perhaps its most influential version today is the notion of ‘conspicuous consumption’, a term made famous just over a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in his critique of the American rich and their flashy display of luxury.21 Since people want to be loved and admired, such luxury enjoyed

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music-hall’ were the cultural byproducts of imperialism and inequality. The lower classes aped the manners of financiers and aristocrats; Hobson admired the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who who had attacked the luxurious lifestyles of the American rich as a form of social waste, and would meet him in Washington, DC, in

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of goods around 1900 disrupted established codes of status. Accumulation and display were a way to reassert social hierarchies. In 1899, the heterodox Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen christened this phenomenon ‘conspicuous consumption’. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he focused primarily on the super-rich and their use of costly entertainments

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’ existence. Interestingly, American houses stopped growing in the 2000s, in spite of dizzying bonuses and escalating inequality. Many observers continue to take their inspiration from Thorstein Veblen, the great critic of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in America a century ago, whom we met earlier. Veblen’s moral outrage about the wastefulness of elite leisure

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, Understanding Consumption (Oxford, 1992); Herbert A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (Cambridge, MA, 1982); and D. Southerton A. Ulph, eds., Sustainable Consumption (Oxford, 2014). 21. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899/1953). 22. For this emerging field, see, e.g., Jukka Gronow

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: Cornhill Magazine, 36 (July 1877), repr. in The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson (1895 edn), 73; emphasis in original. 25. This applies to Thorstein Veblen as well, whose theory of the idle rich ignored the hard-working Rockefellers and more thrifty members of the elite. For a more balanced picture

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street

by Justin Fox  · 29 May 2009  · 461pp  · 128,421 words

in the United States appeared due for a turn in the latter direction, the direction of the institutionalists. The institutionalist of most durable fame was Thorstein Veblen, author of acid critiques of capitalism that are still in print and coiner of such durable terms as “conspicuous consumption” and “technocracy.” Veblen had studied

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Reserve System—were the work of lawyers, bankers, and other practical sorts, not economists. The institutional economists envisioned themselves as technocrats, the business engineers that Thorstein Veblen argued would steer the economy more rationally than profit-driven “absentee owners” could.14 It’s hard to run a technocracy without a technology, though

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the most famous economist of the twentieth century. What was this Keynesianism? In part, it was a critique of free market verities that surpassed even Thorstein Veblen’s in its stinging mockery. “Professional investment,” Keynes wrote in a famous passage of his 1936 classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

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of orthodox economic theory had long been that its assumptions were unrealistic, that man was not really “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains,” as Thorstein Veblen put it in 1898.5 Friedman’s gloriously liberating reply in 1953 was, So what!? [T]he relevant question to ask about the “assumptions” of

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of independent shop owners and entrepreneurs seemed laughable to most of America’s intellectuals. The mockery had begun at the turn of the century with Thorstein Veblen’s tirades against free market economists and the capitalists they celebrated.13 It continued less caustically in Berle and Means’s book, and achieved more

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me.” David Hume, The Philosophical Works of David Hume, vol. 4, sec. 4, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding” (Aalen, Germany: Scientia Verlag, 1964), 30. 8. Thorstein Veblen, “Fisher’s Capital and Income,” Political Science Quarterly (March 1908): 112. 9. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself

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Economy 29 (1997): 3. Reprinted in Wesley Clair Mitchell, The Backward Art of Spending Money (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), ix–xxxv. 14. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking, 1921). 15. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (San Diego: Harcourt

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York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946). 4. Milton Friedman, “Wesley C. Mitchell as Economic Theorist,” Journal of Political Economy (Dec. 1950): 465–93. 5. Thorstein Veblen, “Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (July 1898). Reprinted in Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other

The Power Elite

by C. Wright Mills and Alan Wolfe  · 1 Jan 1956  · 568pp  · 174,089 words

power. Perhaps that is what has happened to the local societies and metropolitan 400’s of the United States. In his theory of American prestige, Thorstein Veblen, being more interested in psychological gratification, tended to overlook the social function of much of what he described. But prestige is not merely social nonsense

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of 1940. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. Table 2. 16. See ibid. Table 14, pp. 89 ff. 17. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 235, 234. 18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953), p. 162. Cf. also my Introduction to that edition for

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drawn upon Harold Nicolson’s The Meaning of Prestige (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1937). 34. Gustave Le Bon, op. cit. p. 140. 35. Cf. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953). 36. Cf. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and

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. Time, 2 June 1952, pp. 21–2. 25. Business Week, 15 August 1954. 26. ‘You’ll Never Get Rich,’ Fortune, March 1938, p. 66. 27. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1898;, pp. 247–9. 28. H. Irving Hancock, Life at West Point (New York: Putnam, 1903

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consumption’ and ‘conspicuous waste.’ For America, and for the second generation of the period of which he wrote, he was generally correct. * A word about Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) which—fortunately—is still read, not because his criticism of the American upper class is still adequate

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer

by Nicholas Shaxson  · 10 Oct 2018  · 482pp  · 149,351 words

up to, without accounting for folly, cruelty, sex, friendship, credulity and the general rough and tumble of our crazy lives. The renegade economist and thinker Thorstein Veblen was an extraterrestrial of a different kind. He too perched himself outside the normal range of human experience, but this enabled him to sit far

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and Nicholas Shaxson, ‘The Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt economies’, Tax Justice Network, May 2013. 1 Sabotage 1. Nils Gilman, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s neglected feminism’, Journal of Economic Issues, September 1999. 2. Cited in Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman, The Political ideas of

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Thorstein Veblen, p.16. The friend was a professor called Jacob Warshaw. 3. As Matthew Watson of Warwick University put it, Leisure Class was in a sense

…

books; it raises barely a stir in the collective consciousness of contemporary economists.’ Watson sent me these comments via email, 2016. See also Matthew Watson, ‘Thorstein Veblen, The Thinker Who Saw Through the Competitiveness Agenda’, foolsgold.international, 29 February 2016, to be posted on financecurse.org. 4. William Heath Robinson was a

…

Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracies and corrupt economies’. This present book is substantially the fruit of those earlier pieces of work. 38. Thorstein Veblen, who once asked a student to assess the value of her church to her in terms of kegs of beer, would have understood the problem

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Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

by Donovan Hohn  · 1 Jan 2010  · 473pp  · 154,182 words

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics

by Robert Skidelsky  · 13 Nov 2018

Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World

by David Kerrigan  · 18 Jun 2017  · 472pp  · 80,835 words

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety

by Dalton Conley  · 27 Dec 2008  · 204pp  · 67,922 words

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff  · 22 Mar 2022  · 573pp  · 142,376 words

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

by Greta Thunberg  · 14 Feb 2023  · 651pp  · 162,060 words

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris  · 14 Feb 2023  · 864pp  · 272,918 words

The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age

by Claudia Hammond  · 5 Dec 2019  · 249pp  · 81,217 words