author
Thorstein Veblen
1857–1929
A sharp-eyed critic of wealth and status, this pioneering economist helped give the world the idea of “conspicuous consumption.” His writing still feels fresh because it asks a simple, unsettling question: what are people really buying when they spend money?
4 Audiobooks
The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
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 and raised largely in rural Minnesota, Thorstein Veblen became one of the most distinctive American thinkers of his era. He studied at Carleton College and later earned a Ph.D. from Yale, bringing philosophy, economics, and social criticism together in a voice that never sounded quite like anyone else.
Veblen is best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the book that made him famous and introduced the lasting idea of conspicuous consumption. Rather than treating the economy as a neat system of rational choices, he looked at habits, institutions, competition, and social display, arguing that people often consume goods to signal status as much as to satisfy needs.
He taught at several universities, including the University of Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Missouri, though he never fit comfortably inside academic life. That outsider streak shaped his work: skeptical, witty, and unsparing toward business culture, privilege, and fashionable respectability. He died in California in 1929, but his influence remains strong in economics, sociology, and cultural criticism.