Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) was an American economist and sociologist noted for developing institutional economics and for his critical analysis of industrial society. He argued that economic behavior is shaped by social institutions, culture, and status concerns rather than by abstract utility alone.

His best-known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), introduced conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, explaining how elites spend to display wealth and maintain social hierarchy; a broader critique of how pecuniary culture shapes values and behavior. He used terms such as predatory wealth and the status competition embedded in ostentation.

In The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), he examined the conflict between industrial and financial interests, arguing that modern corporate structures privilege profiteering and control by business managers and financiers over productive efficiency, leading to social costs and economic instability. He developed the concept of the machine process as central to modern capitalism and discussed absentee ownership in his later work.

Later works include Absentee Ownership (1923), which analyzed how owners distant from productive labor could extract wealth, and his critique of empiricism and rational-actor economics in favor of institutional and evolutionary perspectives. He influenced institutional economics, sociology of culture, and organizational theory; his work inspired later scholars in economics and social science.

Legacy and reception: Veblen's insistence that economic life is embedded in social arrangements helped shift social science toward institutional and evolutionary approaches. Critics note his dense prose and broad generalizations, but his concepts remain influential in critiques of consumer society and corporate power.