Thorsten Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929) was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.

In his best-known book, ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'' (1899), Veblen coined the concepts of ''conspicuous consumption'' and ''conspicuous leisure''. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.

As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era in the US, Veblen attacked production for profit. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non-Marxist critiques of fascism, capitalism, and of technological determinism.

Biography

Early life and family background

Veblen was born on July 30, 1857, in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American immigrant parents, Thomas Veblen and Kari Bunde. He was the sixth of twelve children.

His parents had emigrated from Norway to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September 16, 1847, with few funds and no knowledge of English. Despite their limited circumstances as immigrants, Thomas Veblen's knowledge in carpentry and construction, paired with his wife's supportive perseverance, allowed them to establish a family farm in Rice County, Minnesota, where they moved in 1864.. (The Veblen farmstead, located near the town of Nerstrand, became a National Historic Landmark in 1981.)

Veblen began his schooling at age 5. Although Norwegian was his first language, he learned English from neighbors and at school. His parents also learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their family on the farmstead. The family farm eventually grew more prosperous, allowing Veblen's parents to provide their children with formal education. Unlike most immigrant families of the time, Veblen and all of his siblings received training in lower schools and went on to receive higher education at the nearby Carleton College. Veblen's sister, Emily, was reputedly the first daughter of Norwegian immigrants to graduate from an American college. The eldest Veblen child, Andrew Veblen, ultimately became a professor of physics at Iowa State University and the father of one of America's leading mathematicians, Oswald Veblen of Princeton University.

Several commentators saw Veblen's ethnic-Norwegian background and his relative "isolation from American society" in Minnesota as essential to the understanding of his writings. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman maintained that Veblen's background as a child of immigrants meant that Veblen was alienated from his parents' original culture, but that his "living in a Norwegian society within America" made him unable to completely "assimilate and accept the available forms of Americanism." According to Stanford historian George M. Fredrickson (1959), the "Norwegian society" that Veblen lived in (Minnesota) was so "isolated" that when he left it "he was, in a sense, emigrating to America."

Education

At age 17, in 1874, Veblen was sent to attend nearby Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Early in his schooling he demonstrated both the bitterness and the sense of humor that would characterize his later works. Veblen studied economics and philosophy under the guidance of the young John Bates Clark (1847–1938), who went on to become a leader in the new field of neoclassical economics. Clark influenced Veblen greatly, and as Clark initiated him into the formal study of economics, Veblen came to recognize the nature and limitations of hypothetical economics that would begin to shape his theories. Veblen later developed an interest in the social sciences, taking courses within the fields of philosophy, natural history, and classical philology. Within the realm of philosophy, the works of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) were of greatest interest to him, inspiring several preconceptions of socio-economics. In contrast, his studies in natural history and classical philology shaped his formal use of the disciplines of science and language respectively.

After Veblen graduated from Carleton in 1880 he traveled east to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns Hopkins he studied under Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). When he failed to obtain a scholarship there he moved on to Yale University, where he found economic support for his studies, obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy in 1884, with a major in philosophy and a minor in social studies. His dissertation was titled "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution." At Yale he studied under renowned academics such as philosopher Noah Porter (1811–1892) and sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910).

Marriages

The two primary relationships that Veblen had were with his two wives. Despite a reputation to the contrary, there is little evidence that he had sexual liaisons with other women.

During his time at Carleton College, Veblen met his first wife, Ellen Rolfe, the niece of the college president. They married in 1888. While some scholars have blamed alleged womanizing tendencies for the couple's numerous separations and eventual divorce in 1911, others have speculated that the relationship's demise was rooted in Ellen's inability to bear children. Following her death in 1926, it was revealed that she had asked for her autopsy to be sent to Veblen, her ex-husband. The autopsy showed that Ellen's reproductive organs had not developed normally, and she had been unable to bear children. A book written by Veblen's stepdaughter asserted that "this explained her disinterest in a normal wifely relationship with Thorstein" and that he "treated her more like a sister, a loving sister, than a wife".

Veblen married Ann Bradley Bevans, a former student, in 1914 and became stepfather to her two girls, Becky and Ann. For the most part, it appears that they had a happy marriage. Ann was described by her daughter as a suffragette, a socialist, and a staunch advocate of unions and workers' rights. A year after he married Ann, they were expecting a child together, but the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Veblen never had any children of his own.

Later life

After his wife Ann's premature death in 1920, Veblen became active in the care of his stepdaughters. Becky went with him when he moved to California, looked after him there, and was with him at his death in August 1929. Prior to his death, Veblen had earned a comparatively high salary from the New School. Since he lived frugally, Veblen invested his money in California raisin vineyards and the stock market. Unfortunately, after returning to northern California, Veblen lost the money he had invested and lived in a house on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park (that once belonged to his first wife). Earning $500 to $600 a year from royalties and a yearly sum of $500 sent by a former Chicago student, he lived there until his death in 1929.

Academic career

After graduation from Yale in 1884, Veblen was essentially unemployed for seven years. Despite having strong letters of recommendation, he was unable to obtain a university position. It is possible that his dissertation research on "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution" (1884) was considered undesirable. However, this possibility can no longer be researched because Veblen's dissertation has been missing from Yale since 1935. Apparently the only scholar who ever studied the dissertation was Joseph Dorfman, for his 1934 book ''Thorstein Veblen and His America''. Dorfman says only that the dissertation, advised by evolutionary sociologist William Graham Sumner, studies such evolutionary thought as that of Herbert Spencer, as well as the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Some historians have also speculated that this failure to obtain employment was partially due to prejudice against Norwegians, while others attribute this to the fact that most universities and administrators considered him insufficiently educated in Christianity. Most academics at the time held divinity degrees, which Veblen did not have. Also, it did not help that Veblen openly identified as an agnostic, which was highly uncommon for the time. As a result, Veblen returned to his family farm, a stay during which he had claimed to be recovering from malaria. He spent those years recovering and reading voraciously. It is suspected that these difficulties in beginning his academic career later inspired portions of his book ''The Higher Learning in America'' (1918), in which he claimed that true academic values were sacrificed by universities in favor of their own self-interest and profitability.

In 1891, Veblen left the farm to return to graduate school to study economics at Cornell University under the guidance of economics professor James Laurence Laughlin. With the help of Professor Laughlin, who was moving to the University of Chicago, Veblen became a fellow at that university in 1892. Throughout his stay, he did much of the editorial work associated with the ''Journal of Political Economy'', one of the many academic journals created during this time at the University of Chicago. Veblen used the journal as an outlet for his writings. His writings also began to appear in other journals, such as the ''American Journal of Sociology'', another journal at the university. While he was mostly a marginal figure at the University of Chicago, Veblen taught a number of classes there.

In 1899, Veblen published his first and best-known book, titled ''The Theory of the Leisure Class''. This did not immediately improve Veblen's position at the University of Chicago. He requested a raise after the completion of his first book, but this was denied.

Veblen's students at Chicago considered his teaching "dreadful". Stanford students considered his teaching style "boring". But this was more excusable than some of Veblen's personal affairs. He offended Victorian sentiments with extramarital affairs while at the University of Chicago. At Stanford in 1909, Veblen was ridiculed again for being a womanizer and an unfaithful husband. As a result, he was forced to resign from his position, which made it very difficult for him to find another academic position. One story claims that he was fired from Stanford after Jane Stanford sent him a telegram from Paris, having disapproved of Veblen's support of Chinese coolie workers in California. (Note that Jane Stanford was already dead by 1905 and Veblen appointed in 1906, which casts doubt on this story.)

With the help of Herbert J. Davenport, a friend who was the head of the economics department at the University of Missouri, Veblen accepted a position there in 1911. Veblen, however, did not enjoy his stay at Missouri. This was in part due to his position as a lecturer being of lower rank than his previous positions and for lower pay. Veblen also strongly disliked the town of Columbia, Missouri, where the university was located. Although he may not have enjoyed his stay at Missouri, in 1914 he did publish another of his best-known books, ''The Instincts of Worksmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts'' (1914). After World War I began, Veblen published ''Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution'' (1915). He considered warfare a threat to economic productivity and contrasted the authoritarian politics of Germany with the democratic tradition of Britain, noting that industrialization in Germany had not produced a progressive political culture.

By 1917, Veblen moved to Washington, D.C. to work with a group that had been commissioned by President Woodrow Wilson to analyze possible peace settlements for World War I, culminating in his book ''An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation'' (1917). This marked a series of distinct changes in his career path. Following that, Veblen worked for the United States Food Administration for a period of time. Shortly thereafter, Veblen moved to New York City to work as an editor for a magazine, ''The Dial''. Within the next year, the magazine shifted its orientation and he lost his editorial position.

In the meantime, Veblen had made contacts with several other academics, such as Charles A. Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and John Dewey. The group of university professors and intellectuals eventually founded The New School for Social Research. Known today as The New School, in 1919 it emerged from American modernism, progressivism, the democratic education. The group was open to students and aimed for a "an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth, and present working". From 1919 to 1926, Veblen continued to write and maintain a role in The New School's development. It was during this time that he wrote ''The Engineers and the Price System''. In it, Veblen proposed a soviet of engineers. According to Yngve Ramstad, the view that engineers, not workers, would overthrow capitalism was a "novel view". Veblen invited Guido Marx to the New School to teach and to help organize a movement of engineers with others such as Morris Cooke; Henry Gantt, who had died shortly before; and Howard Scott. Cooke and Gantt were followers of Frederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management theory. Scott, who listed Veblen as being on the temporary organizing committee of the Technical Alliance, perhaps without consulting Veblen or other listed members, later helped found the technocracy movement.

Influences on Veblen

American pragmatism distrusted the notion of the absolute, and instead recognized the notion of free will. Rather than God's divine intervention taking control of the happenings of the universe, pragmatism believed that people, using their free will, shape the institutions of society. Veblen also recognized this as an element of causes and effects, upon which he based many of his theories. This pragmatist belief was pertinent to the shaping of Veblen's critique of natural law and the establishment of his evolutionary economics, which recognized the purpose of man throughout. The skepticism of the German Historical School regarding laissez-faire economics was also adopted by Veblen.

From 1896 to 1926, he spent summers at his study cabin on Washington Island in Wisconsin. On the island he learned Icelandic, which allowed him to write articles accepted by an Icelandic newspaper and translate the '' Laxdæla saga'' into English.

Contributions to social theory

Institutional economics

Thorstein Veblen laid the foundation for the perspective of institutional economics with his criticism of traditional static economic theory. As much as Veblen was an economist, he was also a sociologist who rejected his contemporaries who looked at the economy as an autonomous, stable, and static entity. Veblen disagreed with his peers, as he strongly believed that the economy was significantly embedded in social institutions. Rather than separating economics from the social sciences, Veblen viewed the relationships between the economy and social and cultural phenomena. Generally speaking, the study of institutional economics viewed economic institutions as the broader process of cultural development. While economic institutionalism never transformed into a major school of economic thought, it allowed economists to explore economic problems from a perspective that incorporated social and cultural phenomena. It also allowed economists to view the economy as an evolving entity of bounded rationale.

Conspicuous consumption

In his most famous work, ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'', Veblen writes critically of the leisure class for its role in fostering wasteful consumption, or conspicuous waste. In this first work Veblen coined the term ''conspicuous consumption'', which he defined as spending more money on goods than they are worth.

The term originated during the Second Industrial Revolution when a ''nouveau riche'' social class emerged as a result of the accumulation of capital wealth. He explains that members of the leisure class, often associated with business, are those who also engage in conspicuous consumption to impress the rest of society through the manifestation of their social power and prestige, be it real or perceived. In other words, social status, Veblen explained, becomes earned and displayed by patterns of consumption rather than what the individual makes financially. Subsequently, people in other social classes are influenced by this behavior and, as Veblen argued, strive to emulate the leisure class. What results from this behavior, is a society characterized by the waste of time and money. Unlike other sociological works of the time, ''The Theory of the Leisure Class'' focused on consumption, rather than production.

Conspicuous leisure

''Conspicuous leisure'', or the non-productive use of time for the sake of displaying social status, is used by Veblen as the primary indicator of the leisure class. To engage in conspicuous leisure is to openly display one's wealth and status, as productive work signified the absence of pecuniary strength and was seen as a mark of weakness. As the leisure class increased their exemption from productive work, that very exemption became honorific and actual participation in productive work became a sign of inferiority. Conspicuous leisure worked very well to designate social status in rural areas, but urbanization made it so that conspicuous leisure was no longer a sufficient means to display pecuniary

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