54 Facts About Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.

Thorstein Veblen was born on July 30,1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American immigrant parents, Thomas Thorstein Veblen and Kari Bunde.

Thorstein Veblen's parents had emigrated from Norway to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September 16,1847, with few funds and no knowledge of English.

Thorstein Veblen's parents learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their family on the farmstead.

At age 17, in 1874, Thorstein Veblen was sent to attend nearby Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Thorstein Veblen studied economics and philosophy under the guidance of the young John Bates Clark, who went on to become a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics.

Thorstein Veblen later developed an interest in the social sciences, taking courses within the fields of philosophy, natural history, and classical philology.

Thorstein Veblen married Ann Bradley Bevans, a former student, in 1914 and became stepfather to her two girls, Becky and Ann.

Since he lived frugally, Thorstein Veblen invested his money in California raisin vineyards and the stock market.

Unfortunately, after returning to northern California, Thorstein Veblen lost the money he had invested and lived in a house on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park.

However, this possibility can no longer be researched because Thorstein Veblen's dissertation has been missing from Yale since 1935.

Also in 1884, Thorstein Veblen wrote the first English-language study of Kant's third Critique, his 'Kant's Critique of Judgment' published in the July 1884 issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

Also, it did not help that Thorstein Veblen openly identified as an agnostic, which was highly uncommon for the time.

In 1891, Thorstein Veblen left the farm to return to graduate school to study economics at Cornell University under the guidance of economics professor James Laurence Laughlin.

Thorstein Veblen used the journal as an outlet for his writings.

Thorstein Veblen's writings began to appear in other journals, such as the American Journal of Sociology, another journal at the university.

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen published his first and best-known book, titled The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Thorstein Veblen requested a raise after the completion of his first book, but this was denied.

Thorstein Veblen offended Victorian sentiments with extramarital affairs while at the University of Chicago.

At Stanford in 1909, Thorstein Veblen was ridiculed again for being a womanizer and an unfaithful husband.

Thorstein Veblen strongly disliked the town of Columbia, Missouri, where the university was located.

Thorstein Veblen considered warfare a threat to economic productivity and contrasted the authoritarian politics of Germany with the democratic tradition of Britain, noting that industrialization in Germany had not produced a progressive political culture.

Shortly thereafter, Thorstein Veblen moved to New York City to work as an editor for a magazine, The Dial.

From 1919 to 1926, Thorstein Veblen continued to write and maintain a role in The New School's development.

Thorstein Veblen invited Guido Marx to the New School to teach and to help organize a movement of engineers with others such as Morris Cooke; Henry Gantt, who had died shortly before; and Howard Scott.

Scott, who listed Thorstein Veblen as being on the temporary organizing committee of the Technical Alliance, perhaps without consulting Thorstein Veblen or other listed members, later helped found the technocracy movement.

Thorstein Veblen recognized this as an element of causes and effects, upon which he based many of his theories.

Thorstein Veblen laid the foundation for the perspective of institutional economics with his criticism of traditional static economic theory.

Thorstein Veblen disagreed with his peers, as he strongly believed that the economy was significantly embedded in social institutions.

Rather than separating economics from the social sciences, Thorstein Veblen viewed the relationships between the economy and social and cultural phenomena.

Thorstein Veblen explains that members of the leisure class, often associated with business, are those who engage in conspicuous consumption to impress the rest of society through the manifestation of their social power and prestige, be it real or perceived.

In other words, social status, Thorstein Veblen explained, becomes earned and displayed by patterns of consumption rather than what the individual makes financially.

Subsequently, people in other social classes are influenced by this behavior and, as Thorstein Veblen argued, strive to emulate the leisure class.

High-status individuals, as Thorstein Veblen explains, could instead afford to live their lives leisurely, engaging in symbolic economic participation, rather than practical economic participation.

The central problem for Thorstein Veblen was the friction between "business" and "industry".

Thorstein Veblen identified business as the owners and leaders whose primary goal was the profits of their companies but who, in an effort to keep profits high, often made efforts to limit production.

Thorstein Veblen coined this phrase in 1914, in his work The Instinct of Workmanship and the Industrial Arts.

Thorstein Veblen admired Schmoller, but criticized some other leaders of the German school because of their over-reliance on descriptions, long displays of numerical data, and narratives of industrial development that rested on no underlying economic theory.

Thorstein Veblen tried to use the same approach with his own theory added.

Thorstein Veblen developed a 20th-century evolutionary economics based upon Darwinian principles and new ideas emerging from anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

Unlike the neoclassical economics that emerged at the same time, Thorstein Veblen described economic behavior as socially determined and saw economic organization as a process of ongoing evolution.

Thorstein Veblen rejected any theory based on individual action or any theory highlighting any factor of an inner personal motivation.

Thorstein Veblen wanted economists to grasp the effects of social and cultural change on economic changes.

Thorstein Veblen further spoke of a "predatory phase" of culture in the sense of the predatory attitude having become the habitual spiritual attitude of the individual.

Scholars disagree about the extent to which Thorstein Veblen's views are compatible with Marxism, socialism, or anarchism.

The Thorstein Veblen Dichotomy is still very relevant today and can be applied to thinking around digital transformation.

Historiographical debates continue over Thorstein Veblen's commissioned 1913 writings on "the blond race" and "the Aryan culture" in the context of cultural and social anthropology.

Thorstein Veblen's work has remained relevant, and not simply for the phrase "conspicuous consumption".

Thorstein Veblen has been cited in the writings of feminist economists.

Thorstein Veblen believed that women had no endowments, believing instead that the behavior of women reflects the social norms of their time and place.

Thorstein Veblen theorized that women in the industrial age remained victims of their "barbarian status".

Thorstein Veblen's work has often been cited in American literary works.

Thorstein Veblen is featured in The Big Money by John Dos Passos, and mentioned in Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street.

Thorstein Veblen goods are named for him, based on his work in The Theory of the Leisure Class.