Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born July 30, 1857, Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, USA, and died August 3, 1929 near Menlo Park, California, USA) was an American economist and sociologist who took an evolutionary, dynamic approach to the study of economic institutions. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) made him famous in literary circles, and the expression he coined "conspicuous consumption", describing the life of rich people, is still widely used today.
Early years
Thorstein Veblen was born to Norwegian parents and did not know English until he went to school, so he spoke with an accent all his life. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 3 years, proving himself to be a brilliant student and a mocking maverick. Veblen studied philosophy under Johns Hopkins and at Yale University, earning a Ph. D. in 1884. Unable to find a teaching position, he returned to his father's farm in Minnesota, where he spent most of the next 7 years reading. According to the biographer, within a few days you canyou could only see the top of his head in the attic window.
In 1888, Veblen married Ellen Rolf, who came from a we althy and influential family. Unable to find work, in 1891 he entered graduate school at Cornell University. There, Thorstein impressed J. Lawrence Laughlin so much that when the latter was asked to head the economics department at the new University of Chicago in 1892, he took him with him. But Veblen became a teacher only in 1896, when he was 39 years old.
Founder of institutionalism
Veblen's first book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, sub titled An Economic Study of Institutions, was published in 1899. Most of his ideas are presented in the work, which is still read today. Thorstein Veblen's institutionalism consisted in applying Darwin's evolution to the study of contemporary economic life and the influence on it of such social institutions as the state, law, traditions, morality, etc. The industrial system, in his opinion, required conscientiousness, efficiency and cooperation, then how the leaders of the business world were interested in making a profit and showing off their we alth. An echo of a predatory, barbarian past - that's what Thorstein Veblen meant by the word "we alth". He took obvious pleasure in exploring "modern relics" in entertainment, fashion, sports, religion, and the aesthetic tastes of the ruling class. The work interested the literary world, where it was read as a satire rather than a scientific work, and thus Veblen acquiredreputation as a social critic whose worldview extended far beyond the academic horizon.
Career failures
However, his reputation has not brought him academic success. He was an indifferent teacher who despised the university ritual of lecturing and exams. His most famous course, Economic Factors in Civilization, covered vast areas of history, law, anthropology, and philosophy, but paid little attention to orthodox economics. In 1904, he published The Theory of Entrepreneurship, in which he expanded on his evolutionary theme of the incompatibility of the modern industrial process and the irrational means of business and finance (i.e., differences in the production of goods and the earning of money).
In Chicago, Veblen only reached the rank of assistant professor and was forced to leave the university after being accused of adultery. In 1906 he began teaching at Stanford University. After 3 years, his personal affairs again forced him to retire.
Productive Period
With some difficulty, Thorstein Veblen found a teaching position at the University of Missouri at much lower pay and remained there from 1911 to 1918. He divorced Ellen Rolf, whom he had been married to since 1888, and in 1914 married Anna Fessenden Bradley. She had two children (both girls), whom she raised in accordance with the utilitarian ideas of her husband, set out in The Theory of Idleclass.”
In Missouri, the economist has experienced a fruitful period. In Thorstein Veblen's The Instinct for Mastery and the State of Industrial Art (1914), the emphasis was on the fact that the business enterprise is in fundamental conflict with the human propensity for useful effort. Too much of humanity's energy has been wasted through inefficient institutions. World War I reinforced Veblen's pessimism about the prospects for the human race. In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), he suggested that this country had an advantage over democracies such as the United Kingdom and France because its autocracy was able to channel the gains of modern technology into the service of the state. He acknowledged that the advantage was only temporary, as the German economy would eventually develop its own system of conspicuous waste. The book An Inquiry into the Nature of the World and the Conditions for its Perpetuation (1917) brought Veblen international recognition. In it, he argued that modern wars are driven primarily by the competitive demands of national business interests, and that lasting peace can only be secured through property rights and a price system in which these rights are enforced.
Further career
In February 1918, Veblen took a job with the US Food Administration in Washington, but his approach to economic problems was useless to government officials, and he remained in office for less than 5 months. In the autumn of 1918 he became a member of the editorial board of The Dial, a New York literary and political journal, for which he wrote a series of articles, The Modern Point of View and the New Order, later published as The Entrepreneurs and the Common Man (1919). Another series of articles that appeared later in the journal was published in Thorstein Veblen's Engineers and the Pricing System (1921). In them, the author developed his ideas for reforming the economic system. He believed that engineers with the knowledge to run an industry should take the lead because they would manage by increasing efficiency, not profit. This theme was central to the technocratic movement that briefly existed during the Great Depression.
Final Years
While Thorstein Veblen's prestige reached new heights, his personal life didn't work out. He left The Dial after a year with the publication. His second wife had a nervous breakdown, followed by her death in 1920. Veblen himself also needed the care of a few devoted friends and apparently could not talk to strangers interested in his ideas. He briefly lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York and was financially supported by a former student. Veblen's last book, Absentee Property and Entrepreneurship in the Modern Age: An American Case (1923), was poorly written and was a monotonous review of corporate finance, in which he againemphasized the contradiction between industry and business.
In 1926, he gave up teaching and returned to California, where he lived with his stepdaughter in a mountain cabin overlooking the sea. There he remained for the rest of his life.
Meaning
Thorstein Veblen's reputation reached another high point in the 1930s, when it seemed to many that the Great Depression justified his criticism of business. Although the reading public regarded him as a political radical or socialist, the American economist was a pessimist who never entered politics. Among his colleagues, he had both fans and critics, but there were more of the latter. The scientific analysis of modern industrial society owes much to Veblen's German colleague Max Weber, whose ideas are more complex. Even his closest students found his anthropological and historical approach too broad to satisfy their scientific requirements, although they admired his extensive and original knowledge. One of his most famous admirers, Wesley K. Mitchell, called him "a visitor from another world" and noted that social science knows no other such liberator of the mind from the subtle tyranny of circumstances, nor a similar pioneer of new areas of economic research.
