Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) was an American economist and social critic best known for coining the term conspicuous consumption and for his caustic analyses of capitalism’s “leisure class.”britannica+1
Veblen was born in rural Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrant parents and grew up on a small, largely self-sufficient Midwestern farm, speaking Norwegian at home and learning English only when he began school.thebaffler+1
He studied at Carleton College and then at leading graduate institutions (including Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago), eventually entering the academic elite despite a long period of underemployment.hup.harvard+1
At Chicago he moved from fellow to instructor and began publishing the work that made his reputation, though he remained an indifferent teacher and something of a misfit in university life.britannica+1
His personal life was uneven, his academic appointments precarious, and he ended his career largely outside mainstream economics, writing for journals and magazines and living quietly in California, where he died in 1929.britannica
The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) introduced the ideas of conspicuous consumption and “pecuniary emulation” to describe how elites display wealth and how others imitate them, shaping tastes, status competition, and wasteful spending.hup.harvard+1
The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) expanded his evolutionary critique of capitalism, distinguishing between the industrial process of making goods and the financial/business pursuit of making money, which he saw as often in conflict.thebaffler+1
Later works such as The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919), The Engineers and the Price System (1921), and The Higher Learning in America (1918) attacked the power of vested interests in business, politics, and universities and explored how technical expertise and scientific work were subordinated to profit.sites.duke+1
Across these books he drew on Darwinian evolution, anthropology, and psychology to build an “institutional” economics centered on habits, institutions, and social power rather than abstract, rational individuals.cambridge+1
Veblen’s account of conspicuous consumption underpins modern research on consumer culture, status goods, luxury branding, and “positional” competition, especially in highly unequal societies.cambridge+1
His distinction between productive industrial activity and predatory pecuniary pursuits anticipates contemporary critiques of financialization, rent-seeking, and speculative bubbles in late capitalism.cambridge+1
In debates about inequality and “new Gilded Ages,” scholars often return to Veblen’s portraits of the leisure class and his analysis of how elites justify and display their privileges.lareviewofbooks+2
Institutional and evolutionary economics, as well as some strands of sociology and political economy, treat Veblen as a foundational figure for studying how institutions, technology, and habits coevolve rather than taking market structures as given.jstor+1
The Theory of the Leisure Class remains the essential entry point; it is still widely read for both its theoretical insights and its satirical style.thebaffler+1
For a modern intellectual biography and contextualization, the recent study Veblen (Harvard University Press, by sociologist Camic) reconstructs his formation and shows how his ideas fit into the emergence of modern social science.pdxscholar.library.pdx+1
Contemporary reassessments—such as conference collections on his 150th birthday and recent essays on his relevance—use Veblen to frame critiques of consumerism, corporate power, and the limits of orthodox economics.sites.duke+2