Tag Archives: Thorstein Veblen

I always enjoy reading Thorstein Veblen, partly because his writing strays back and forth across the line between "raising questions of real interest" to "just plain old dyspeptic and cantankerous." His 1918 essay "The Higher Learning In America:A Memorandum On the Conduct of Universities By Business Men" is full of comments from both categories, often closely overlapping. It's also the source of one of the liveliest insults to the field of economics, that economics is "a `science' of...

The Man Who Saw Trump Coming A Century Ago: A Reader’s Guide for the Distraught Tom DispatchTomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Moment

The timing could not have been better, at least for me. It just so happens I’m teaching Thorsten Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class this week. It should become quickly obvious to students that, as I have argued before on this blog, we’re now in the midst of a Second Gilded Age. This is confirmed in a new report by UBS/PwC, according to which, after a brief pause in 2015, the expansion in billionaire wealth around the world has resumed. This is an inevitable result of a system that...