author
Thorstein Veblen
1857–1929
Best known for introducing the idea of “conspicuous consumption,” this sharp and unconventional thinker turned everyday habits of status and spending into a lasting critique of modern capitalism. His writing still feels fresh because it asks why people buy, work, and compete the way they do.
4 Audiobooks
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
by Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts
by Thorstein Veblen
An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation
by Thorstein Veblen
About the author
Born in Wisconsin in 1857 to Norwegian immigrant parents, Thorstein Veblen became one of the most distinctive American economists and social critics of his era. He studied at Carleton College and later earned a Ph.D. from Yale, developing an approach that treated economic life as something shaped by habits, institutions, and social pressures rather than by simple formulas alone.
Veblen is most famous for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the book that introduced the term “conspicuous consumption.” With wit and skepticism, he examined how wealth and status are displayed in public life, and he became a major early voice in what came to be known as institutional economics.
He taught at places including the University of Chicago and Stanford, though his career was often as unconventional as his ideas. Veblen died in California in 1929, but his work has remained influential in economics, sociology, and cultural criticism because of the way it connects money, power, and social behavior.