Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen was born in 1857 in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents, and grew up on a family farm in Rice County, Minnesota. He studied at Carleton College in Minnesota and then at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, earning a doctorate in philosophy at Yale in 1884. Unable to find an academic post for seven years, he spent much of that time on his family's farm. He later studied economics at Cornell University and went on to teach at the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Missouri and the New School for Social Research in New York. His most famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), argued that wealthy people often buy expensive goods and pursue costly pastimes mainly to display their status, a habit he called 'conspicuous consumption'. In other books, such as The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), he contrasted the productive work of engineers and craftsmen with businesses focused on profit. He is regarded as a founder of the school of institutional economics, which studies how social habits and institutions shape economic life. He died in California in 1929.

Thorstein Veblen is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised Lutheran; he openly identified as an agnostic. Source: Wikipedia