Thorstein Veblen

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The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Martha Banta

Albert Einstein, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Donald Trump, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, greed is good, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois

Critical Studies Banta, Martha, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago, 1993). Brown, Doug (ed.), Thorstein Veblen in the Twenty-First Century: A Commemoration of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899–1999) (Cheltenham, 1998). Daugert, Stanley Matthew, The Philosophy of Thorstein Veblen (New York, 2002). Diggins, John F., The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (New York, 1978). Dorfman, Joseph, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1961). Dowd, Douglas F. (ed.), Thorstein Veblen, A Critical Reappraisal: Lectures and Essays Commemorating The Hundredth Anniversary of Veblen’s Birth (Ithaca, NY, 1958).

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Eby, Clare Virginia, Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo (Columbia, Mo., 1998). Mestrovic, Stjepan Gabriel, Thorstein Veblen on Culture and Society (London, 2003). Patsouras, Louis, Thorstein Veblen and the American Way of Life (Montreal, 2004). Riesman, David, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New York, 1953). Rosenberg, Bernard, The Values of Veblen: A Critical Appraisal (Washington, DC, 1956). Schneider, Louis, The Freudian Psychology and Veblen’s Social Theory (New York, 1948). Seckler, David, Thorstein Veblen and the Institutionalists: A Study in the Social Philosophy of Economics (Boulder, Colo., 1975).

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Iam fides et pax … Audet: ‘now neglected faith and peace, and ancient honour and shame, dares to return’ (Horace, ‘Carmen Saeculare’). 1 Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (New York, 1961), 422. 2 Bernard Rosenberg, Thorstein Veblen (New York, 1963), 1. It is heady to realize that dealing with Veblen’s career prompts paying attention to the disparate work of (among others) Lester Ward, Jacques Loeb, William James, William McDougall, James Frazer, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Tylor, Lewis Mumford, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Charles S. Peirce, George Mead, and John Dewey. Rick Tilman’s The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen: Unresolved Issues (Westport, Conn., 1996) makes this point very well, since ‘legacy’ is the key word when it comes to assessing Veblen’s influence over the developing fields of biology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, physiology, political science, and anthropology. 3 The following comments from the Yale Review and the Journal of Political Economy are cited in Dorfman’s Thorstein Veblen and His America, 191–2. 4 Adorno, ‘Veblen’s Attack on Culture’ (1941), cited in Rick Tilman and Jo Lo Simich (eds.), Thorstein Veblen: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1985), 50. 5 After Veblen’s death in 1929, a tabulation of the sales of his ten books over his lifetime revealed that only 40,000 copies were ever sold.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

It was time to take a second look, and it fell upon the shoulders of two social economists (today they would be known as sociologists) to examine in detail the meaning of the new structure. 2. Oddly enough, while Henry George was largely an advocate of laissez-faire, his land tax scheme encouraged many of his listeners, including George Bernard Shaw and Sydney Webb, to become socialists. See Skousen (2001, 229-30). They are the American Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and the German Max Weber (1864-1920). Thorstein Veblen: The Voice of Dissent Veblen was the principal faultfinder and censor of the new theoretical capitalism. Having taught at ten institutions, including the University of Chicago and Stanford, he had little use for the rational-abstract-deduc-tive approach of the neoclassical model.

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Max Weber: A Spirited Defense of "Rational" Capitalism Fortunately, Thorstein Veblen was not the only social commentator on capitalism at the turn of the century. His chief antagonist came from across the Atlantic—the German sociologist and economist Max Weber, author of the famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber's views on capitalism were more in the spirit of Adam Smith than Veblen. As John Patrick Diggins states, "No two social theorists could be more intellectually and temperamentally opposed than Thorstein Veblen and Max Weber" (1999, 111). Both Veblen and Weber were obsessed with the meaning of contemporary industrial society—the issues of power, management, and surplus wealth.

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New York: Verso. Dewey, Donald. 1987. "John Bates Clark." In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Vol. 1, 428-31. London: Macmillan. Diggins, John Patrick. 1996. Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy. New York: Basic Books. . 1999. Thorstein Veblen, Theorist of the Leisure Class. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dorfman, Joseph. 1934. Thorstein Veblen and His America. New York: Augustus M. Kelley. Downs, Robert B. 1983. Books That Changed the World. 2d ed. New York: Penguin. D'Souza, Dinesh. 2005. "How Capitalism Civilizes Greed." www.dineshdsouza. com/articles/civilizinggreed.html.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

So [sabotage] has come to describe any manoeuvre of slowing-down, inefficiency, bungling, obstruction.’2 By the late nineteenth century the meaning of sabotage was used more widely in American popular parlance: to cover all such peaceable or surreptitious manoeuvres of delay, obstruction, friction, and defeat, whether employed by the workmen to enforce their claims, or by the employers to defeat their employees, or by competitive business concerns to get the better of their business rivals or to secure their own advantage.3 Veblen believed that in this expanded meaning the term ‘sabotage’ captured an important dimension of modern business. Thorstein Veblen is a controversial figure in the history of economic thought. His writing style is archaic, quite convoluted and always political. His legacy is mostly associated with The Theory of the Leisure Class, a critique of consumerism and social divisions in capitalism which he published in 1899. Today, Veblen’s theories are rarely taught in university programmes; global search engines yield many more results for ‘John Maynard Keynes’ and ‘John Commons’ than they do for ‘Thorstein Veblen’. Yet in the wake of the 2007–9 crisis, and in light of the revelations of the Panama and Paradise dossiers and the like, one unavoidably begins to ponder whether Veblen’s theory of sabotage is relevant for making sense of the many apparent crises in the capitalist organization.

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SABOTAGE It is quite difficult to make sense of finance today by relying on textbook approaches, wherever their intellectual or political affinities may lie. To understand the remarkable persistence and prevalence of rogue behaviour, in this book we return to the ideas of a school of thought, often ignored nowadays, known as the old institutional economics (OIE). Most famously associated with the works of Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, this body of scholarship developed in the early years of the twentieth century in the USA, a time when American capitalism was undergoing major finance-driven changes. Observing the type of economy taking hold in the late nineteenth-century USA, and which has spread around the world since, Veblen concluded, first, that the economic system of his time was defined by the figure of the businessmen and not the entrepreneur or the capitalist.

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‘I don’t like the word “sabotage”,’ a former Goldman Sachs trader admitted. ‘It’s just harsh… Though, frankly, how else do you make money in this business… I mean, real money…?’ Could we have found a euphemism for ‘sabotage’, then? A less offensive term to describe a core technique of moneymaking in finance? We suggest not. It was Thorstein Veblen, a father of an important school of thought in economics,1 who first introduced sabotage as a core economic concept. ‘Sabotage,’ he noted, ‘is a derivative of “sabot,” which is French for a wooden shoe. It means going slow, with a dragging, clumsy movement, such as that manner of footgear may be expected to bring on.

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class. Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity. The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it’s also a call to reset our class consciousness.

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We need to start talking about this to figure out a way to install some kind of order or system – a true hierarchy might be antithetical in a truly egalitarian creative economy – that prevents us from giving away our time and work so easily. The notion of a middle class that incorporated leisure into its identity was first coined as such by Thorstein Veblen, a curious sociologist and economist who put out his most well-known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, in 1899. Taking nearly a decade of his life to produce, Veblen’s critique of social and economic behaviour describes the evolution of what he called ‘conspicuous leisure’ and ‘conspicuous consumption,’ two behaviours that had permeated modern life as he saw it.

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They say, This is a real experience, connected and rooted, not concocted. Physicality is important; it provides connections to people who did things and to actual objects that age and alter. It’s a strange kind of ju-jitsu – a rejection of the trappings of middle-class life in favour of a more expensive and cleaner simulation of working-class life. Thorstein Veblen goes into detail about the desirability of a hand-wrought spoon, just as serviceable as one made by the machines of his day, but the effort put into it makes the spoon beautiful and ‘some one-hundred times more valuable’ than a more common spoon. ‘The case of the spoon is typical,’ he writes.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

It may not even be more serviceable … One of the chief uses, if not the chief use, of the costlier spoon is ignored; the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of the beautiful … the material of the hand-wrought spoon is some one hundred times more valuable than the baser metal, without very greatly excelling the latter in intrinsic beauty of grain or color, and without being in any appreciable degree superior in point of mechanical serviceability. —Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) In the 1920s, Muriel Bristol attended a summer’s afternoon tea party in Cambridge, UK. A number of professors and their spouses were also in attendance. On this particular occasion, the host poured Bristol a cup of tea and poured in the milk thereafter.

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Just as our work or family structure cultivates who we are, so does what we buy and the norms of behavior we learn. We must see consumption as appropriated to signal things much deeper than what is simply visible.5 THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS Perhaps no one captured and articulated the social significance of consumption better than the social critic and economist Thorstein Veblen. Written in the late 1800s, Veblen’s polemic treatise The Theory of the Leisure Class is the defining text that precisely expresses the relationship between material goods and status. At the peak of the Gilded Age, and in the wake of the triumphs of the Industrial Revolution, Veblen’s work was very much a sign of the times he lived in.

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CHAPTER 2 Conspicuous Consumption in the Twenty-first Century It is from our disposition to admire, and consequently to imitate, the rich and the great, that they are enabled to set, or to lead what is called the fashion. Their dress is the fashionable dress; the language of their conversation, the fashionable style; their air and deportment, the fashionable behaviour. Even their vices and follies are fashionable. —Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790) In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen observed that conspicuous consumption was also practiced among those outside of the rich, or what he called the “impecunious classes.” These poorer strata of society spent on nonessentials—maybe not as much as the leisure class with their silver spoons and games of croquet, but as he pointed out, from hunter and gatherer societies to the present day, most human beings have a desire to fit in and we often rely on social constructs to do so.

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

To assert that it will continue to repeat implies subscribing to some theory of why.7 Ever since then, most sciences have been swinging back and forth between the poles of deduction and induction. At the turn of the twentieth century, economics in the United States appeared due for a turn in the latter direction, the direction of the institutionalists. The institutionalist of most durable fame was Thorstein Veblen, author of acid critiques of capitalism that are still in print and coiner of such durable terms as “conspicuous consumption” and “technocracy.” Veblen had studied with William Graham Sumner at Yale just as Irving Fisher had, but he seems to have taken different lecture notes. He excoriated neoclassical economics as abstract noodling with no connection to reality.

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Most of the lasting economic innovations of the early Roosevelt years—from the founding of the Securities and Exchange Commission to the revamping of the Federal Reserve System—were the work of lawyers, bankers, and other practical sorts, not economists. The institutional economists envisioned themselves as technocrats, the business engineers that Thorstein Veblen argued would steer the economy more rationally than profit-driven “absentee owners” could.14 It’s hard to run a technocracy without a technology, though. While united by skepticism of the grand theories of neoclassical economics, the institutionalists had no grand theory of their own to explain economic behavior.

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Instead they went by the name “Keynesians,” after John Maynard Keynes, the English speculator, political polemicist, art collector, and all-around bon vivant who would become the most famous economist of the twentieth century. What was this Keynesianism? In part, it was a critique of free market verities that surpassed even Thorstein Veblen’s in its stinging mockery. “Professional investment,” Keynes wrote in a famous passage of his 1936 classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likely to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

Determined to secure a better future in America, the Veblens sent all their children to college, including their four daughters and two subsequently distinguished sons. Andrew Veblen became a professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa, while Thorstein Veblen, born in 1857, became an influential social theorist, best known for coining the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure Class. Thorstein Veblen had a Darwinian eye, sharpened by growing up on the edge of the wilderness, for the coevolution of corporations, financial instruments, and machines. Although respected as an economist, he struggled financially for much of his life, and his only significant personal investments, in the California raisin business, failed.

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Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954): British logician and cryptologist; author of “On Computable Numbers” (1936). Françoise (née Aron) Ulam (1918–2011): French American editor and journalist; wife of Stanislaw Ulam. Stanislaw Marcin Ulam (1909–1984): Polish American mathematician and protégé of John von Neumann. Oswald Veblen (1880–1960): American mathematician, nephew of Thorstein Veblen, and first professor appointed to the IAS in 1932. Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963): Hungarian American aerodynamicist, founder of Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). John von Neumann (born Neumann János; 1903–1957): Hungarian American mathematician; fourth professor appointed to the IAS, in 1933; founder of the IAS ECP.

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The Aberdeen of 1918, its makeshift roads a sea of mud, was a precursor to the Los Alamos of 1943. Its mission was to enlist American science and industry against the German war machine, but by the time the Proving Ground was operational, the war in Europe was drawing to a close. According to Thorstein Veblen, the United States had entered the war, belatedly, only to ensure that the transnational interests of the industrialists would be protected against any social upheavals that peace in Europe might unleash. Oswald Veblen, a sharpshooter at heart, had no doubts about how to help, and improving the accuracy of guns raised none of the moral questions that would later be raised by the development of atomic bombs.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert B. Reich

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, business cycle, carbon tax, declining real wages, delayed gratification, Doha Development Round, endowment effect, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, job automation, junk bonds, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, We are all Keynesians now, World Values Survey

Layard, “Human Satisfactions and Public Policy,” Economic Journal 90, no. 360 (December 1980): 737–50. 4 Adam Smith defined necessities: See Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth and Nations (London: Methuen, 1776), Book 5, Chapter 2. 5 In 1899, the economist-sociologist Thorstein Veblen: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899). See Ken McCormick, “Veblen and Duesenberry: The Demonstration Effect Revisited,” Journal of Economic Issues 17, no. 4 (December 1983): 1125–29. 6 More than a half century later: James Duesenberry, Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior, Harvard Economic Studies, 1967.

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In most of eighteenth-century Europe, a linen shirt was not strictly speaking a necessity, but Smith noted that a common laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without one, “the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.” Leather shoes were a “necessity” in England for both men and women, he wrote, but only for men in Scotland, and for neither in France. In 1899, the economist-sociologist Thorstein Veblen noted that people take their cues from those above them and seek to match their living standards with the “conspicuous consumption” of the very rich. More than a half century later, economist James Duesenberry recognized that the demand for many products has more to do with the social standing they give their purchasers than with any intrinsic value.

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Prices with real meaning come from the actions of businesspeople as they try to make a profit, not from economists fiddling with equations. Therefore, Mises said, capitalism is the only rational economic system. CHAPTER 17 Flashing Your Cash On a small farm in Wisconsin a boy was raised who became one of the most unconventional economic thinkers America ever produced, the closest it had to a Karl Marx. Unlike Marx, Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) didn’t attract bands of revolutionaries. But like Marx, he was an outsider, a critical observer of the fast-changing society that he found himself living in, but wasn’t wholly part of. Marx, a German of Jewish descent, observed from Victorian London the progress of the Industrial Revolution.

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According to Schumpeter, the fruits of modern capitalism – the vast array of goods on offer and the new technologies used to produce them – are created by heroic figures who are modern-day versions of the swashbuckling knights of old. They’re entrepreneurs, men like the railway owner Cornelius Vanderbilt, or Andrew Carnegie, who amassed a huge fortune through expanding the American steel industry. Thorstein Veblen had seen Vanderbilt and his type as throwbacks to ancient societies of violent barbarians, ‘robber barons’ whose aggression made them rich but didn’t benefit society as a whole. But Schumpeter said that it was because they’d channelled their excess energy into industry instead of battle that they’d become society’s wealth creators.

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(If you study economics at university you’ll spend a lot of time learning how to apply the principles of rationality and choice, rather than learning about how, for example, the American or Japanese economies actually work.) Then there’s the question of how powerful the economic method really is. When we met the economist Thorstein Veblen in Chapter 17 we saw that he rejected economists’ standard theories of rationality and choice. Unconventional economists like him say that economics needs to incorporate richer models of human behaviour that go beyond calculations of costs and benefits. And many economists now believe that shopkeepers managing their stock are in fact far from rational, let alone people cooking dinner at home (see Chapter 36).

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Gilfi lan, and Abbott Payton Usher, developed theories of technological progress that rested heavily on Darwinian thought.3 The advertising cliché “New and improved” dates from the earliest years of the new century and captures the idea that products advance in response to changing market competition, much as species evolve in response to changing habitats. With a frequency that was alarming to old-fashioned inventors like Henry Ford, machines, like species, were becoming suddenly extinct. After Thorstein Veblen published his Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, this technological extinction became popularly known as “obsolescence,” a word that Veblen particularly liked to use.4 Beginning with General Electric, manufacturers invested in research and development departments whose express mission was to produce “the next best thing,” and in the process—inevitably—hasten product extinction.

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The other side of this pride and self-presentation equation is shame, or more precisely the anxiety about feeling shamed that creates a state of watchfulness in American consumers for whatever is new. The basic idea in shame-based advertising is that the desire not to lose face can be manipulated to produce conspicuous consumption. This idea is as old as the sumptuary laws that became the basis for the emergent seventeenth-century fashion industry. Thorstein Veblen firs formulated what would become known as conspicuous consumption in 1899. It is important to remember, however, that Veblen’s formula concerned the “vicarious” consumption of the leisure class. In Veblen’s model, aristocratic men created wealth, which their wives consumed and displayed. In a society based on vicarious consumption, the wealth producer is distanced from the shame the consumer (his wife) experiences whenever she appears unfashionable in society.30 But by 1920 Americans were confronted with such an abundance of goods that conspicuous consumption could not remain vicarious.

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And like the criticisms of the technocrats, MacLeish’s acute criticisms of the industrial system were unaccompanied by specifi recommendations about what to do (though he did commend “the share-the-work movement for rationing the residuum of employment among the employed and the unemployed by the introduction of the fi e-day week”).29 In the fall of 1932 when MacLeish’s Fortune article appeared, the technocracy movement’s short-lived popularity was at its peak. Although its earliest origins were in a group called the Technical Alliance led by Thorstein Veblen’s protégé, Howard Scott,tech- nocracy really began in May of 1932 when an ad hoc group, the Industrial Experimenters Association, met briefl at the invitation of Walter Rautenstrauch, a professor of engineering at Columbia University.30 Rautenstrauch was convinced that the ultimate cause of the Depression was the profi motive—the inability of businessmen to curb their quest for profi in the interest of social harmony.

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

To be at leisure, to live a life of study and contemplation, was to enjoy true freedom. But that freedom depended on the work of women and slaves. And, as Aristotle remarked, “There is no leisure for slaves.” When time is money, as it is now, free time is never free. It’s expensive. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen writes that leisure is a form of conspicuous consumption, with time being what is consumed. The upper class is exempt from ordinary employment under capitalism, he observes, just as the aristocracy is exempt from manual labor under feudalism. Leisure is how a class that doesn’t have to work displays its status.

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On leisure, Kalimtzis writes, “Leisure is not preparation but an end possessed, and in fact the very word scholê, according to some scholars, may be derived from the verb echein which means to have or to possess.” Politics, Aristotle, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Digireads.com Publishing, 2017. The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen. Oxford University Press, 2007. First published 1899. The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith. Mariner Books, 1998. First published 1958. THE PROTESTANT ETHIC The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, translated by Stephen Kalberg. Oxford University Press, 2010.

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“Children’s Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences,” Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair. Evolutionary Psychology, April 1, 2011. ART “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” Robert Frost. The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Henry Holt & Co., 1949. WORK The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen. Oxford University Press, 2007. First published 1899. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann. Vintage, 2012. BARTLEBY “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street,” Herman Melville. The Piazza Tales. Dix & Edwards, 1856. “Preferring Not To: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” Jane Desmarais.

Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky

Able Archer 83, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, high-speed rail, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, one-state solution, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, structural adjustment programs, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, uranium enrichment, wage slave, WikiLeaks, working-age population

But there is little reason to expect that the advice will be heeded, as the Pentagon’s planned trillion-dollar enhancement of nuclear weapons systems proceeds apace, while lesser powers take their own steps towards Armageddon.5 The foregoing remarks seem to me to sketch a fair approximation to the cast of primary characters. The chapters that follow seek to explore the question of who rules the world, how they proceed in their efforts, and where these lead—and how the “underlying populations,” to borrow Thorstein Veblen’s useful phrase, may hope to overcome the power of business and nationalist doctrine and become, in his words, “alive and fit to live.” There is not much time. 1 The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux Before thinking about the responsibility of intellectuals, it is worth clarifying to whom we are referring.

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Notable figures such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though President Harding finally relented. Some dissidents, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s brutal persecution of unions, specifically the Industrial Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic nations” and their exalted endeavors.6 The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.

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Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are devoted to the task: public relations, advertising, and marketing generally, all of which add up to a very large component of the gross domestic product. They are dedicated to what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants.”14 In the words of business leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption.” That way people can be atomized, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone, diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge authority.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

The great expectations thus raised were never met, and the present-day equation of a “technocracy” with a distinctly unutopian society reflects the movement’s dismal legacy. The origins of Technocracy are shrouded in controversy, but most of its future leaders were apparently inspired by their association between 1919 and 1921 with the social critic Thorstein Veblen, then teaching at New York City’s New School for Social Research. Veblen offered a strategy, spelled out in The Engineers and the Price System (1921), for ridding American society of the waste Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia 97 and extravagance that he and other reformers had long condemned.

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For elaboration of the discussion about Technocracy in this and the following paragraphs, see my new introduction to the reprint of Harold Loeb, Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996 [1933]). “Technocracy—Bloom, Blight, or Bunk?” Literary Digest, 114 (December 31, 1932), 5. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking, 1933), 135. Anna-K. Mayer, “Reluctant Technocrats: Science Promotion in the Neglect-of-Science Debate of 1916–1918,” History of Science, 43 (2005), 139–159. See Frederic Cople Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885–1918 (New York: Free Press, 1964).

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What may be a utopia to many administrators and students is a dystopia to most faculty. The steady loss of faculty autonomy in curriculum development that stems from embracing a student-centered consumer culture is matched by an equally intense desire to please business and industry and to promote that marriage as made in heaven— or a secular utopia. This development recalls Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America (1918), the pioneering and, by now, classic critique “of business control in practically every aspect of the modern university.”58 (Veblen, as noted, was the intellectual mentor of the Technocracy movement.) As in Veblen’s day, so here: such pandering to business and industry goes far beyond wishing to cultivate the financial and political support of the private sector amid the declining financial and political assistance offered by most states and national governments in recent decades.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This was based on an earlier document, John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson, ‘The Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt economies’, Tax Justice Network, May 2013. 1 Sabotage 1. Nils Gilman, ‘Thorstein Veblen’s neglected feminism’, Journal of Economic Issues, September 1999. 2. Cited in Sidney Plotkin and Rick Tilman, The Political ideas of Thorstein Veblen, p.16. The friend was a professor called Jacob Warshaw. 3. As Matthew Watson of Warwick University put it, Leisure Class was in a sense merely a scene-setter for Business Enterprise: ‘It might very well be described as one of the subject field’s most important forgotten books; it raises barely a stir in the collective consciousness of contemporary economists.’

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And this book contains a tremendous piece of good news: that prize is well within our grasp. 1 Sabotage Some economists behave like aliens who sit in spaceships high above the earth, watching us through powerful telescopes. They record all the scurrying back and forth, then build theories and mathematical models about what we’re up to, without accounting for folly, cruelty, sex, friendship, credulity and the general rough and tumble of our crazy lives. The renegade economist and thinker Thorstein Veblen was an extraterrestrial of a different kind. He too perched himself outside the normal range of human experience, but this enabled him to sit far enough back from humanity to be able to observe our foibles clearly, so as to use them as a starting point for properly understanding the world of money and business.

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As Matthew Watson of Warwick University put it, Leisure Class was in a sense merely a scene-setter for Business Enterprise: ‘It might very well be described as one of the subject field’s most important forgotten books; it raises barely a stir in the collective consciousness of contemporary economists.’ Watson sent me these comments via email, 2016. See also Matthew Watson, ‘Thorstein Veblen, The Thinker Who Saw Through the Competitiveness Agenda’, foolsgold.international, 29 February 2016, to be posted on financecurse.org. 4. William Heath Robinson was a cartoonist famous for drawing ridiculously complicated machines for achieving simple goals. 5. As Watson put it, ‘A repeated theme throughout pretty much every chapter of the 900-page Wealth of Nations is that productive labour is good and should be encouraged, whereas unproductive labour is bad and should be discouraged.

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

Then, over the years, you paid down the mortgage to, say, $200,000. When you sold the house for $400,000, you paid off the mortgage and kept $200,000. So, for an initial investment of $30,000, you walked away with a net gain of $170,000. That’s a 467 percent return for buying and selling a piece of property. A century ago, the American economist Thorstein Veblen called it “something for nothing.”1 A similar sort of leverage kicks in when founders of a private company go public. This might be called equity leverage (as opposed to debt leverage), and its effect can be even more spectacular. Equity leverage works by incorporating anticipated future earnings into present asset prices, thereby enabling stock sellers to get a lump sum now for a potential stream of future profits that may or may not materialize.

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FDR quote on payroll taxes: History site of the Social Security Administration, http://www.ssa.gov/history/Gulick.html. 9. Report of the Committee on Economic Security, Social Security Administration, Washington, DC, 1934, http://www.ssa.gov/history/reports/ces5.html. Chapter 4: Extracted Rent 1. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923). Citation is from Beacon Paperback edition (Boston, 1967), 13. 2. “The Richest People in America, 2013,”Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/. 3. Janet Lowe, Warren Buffett Speaks: Wit and Wisdom from the World’s Greatest Investor (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 164. 4.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

In some cases, it just seems fantastically self-indulgent, as when Marie Antoinette had an entire village built purely in order for her to play at being a milkmaid, or when Michael Jackson had a private amusement park constructed on his estate. In others the extravagance seems to be motivated by a desire to flaunt one’s wealth: that, presumably, is the point of wearing a Rolex watch with diamond inlays and other such items known as “Veblen goods” (named after Thorstein Veblen, the economist who introduced the term “conspicuous consumption”), the main purpose of which is to demonstrate superior status. Sometimes the spending itself can be part of the display, as when some billionaires outbid all comers to secure an artwork they know little about or a star player for the soccer team they own.

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But can it be argued that when people of ample means are extravagant, they in fact do cause harm to others? Two arguments to support this idea suggest themselves. One way extravagance may do harm is through its detrimental knock-on effect. The spectacle of some people being extravagant is one of the most important factors encouraging extravagance in others, a process famously described by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class.7 People spend money to raise their social status: this is the ulterior motivation behind all sorts of spending, whether on things (houses, cars, clothes, technology, gadgets), experiences (vacations, sports), or events (weddings, parties). And as Juliet Schor argues in The Overspent American, keeping up with the Joneses who live down the street has gradually given way to trying to keep up with the usually much richer people seen on television, in commercials, and in other media.

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“Stop Saving Now!” Newsweek, March 13, 2009. 4. Scott Shane, “Start Up Failure Rates: The Definitive Numbers,” Small Business Trends, December 17, 2012. 5. See Phil Izzo, “Congratulations to the Class of 2014, Most Indebted Ever,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2014. 6. Proverbs 19:10. 7. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Dover, 1994), chap. 4. 8. Schor, The Overspent American. 9. Peter Singer, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” New York Times, September 5, 1999. 10. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report 1042, April 2013, consumer units whose income placed them in the lowest 20 percent spent on average $3,547 in 2011 on food, which averages out to $296 per month. http://www.bls.gov/cex/csxann11.pdf. 11.

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, Alan Wolfe

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Asilomar, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, full employment, Ida Tarbell, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, one-China policy, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto

If the prestige of elite circles contains a large element of moral reputation, they can keep it even if they lose considerable power; if they have prestige with but little reputation, their prestige can be destroyed by even a temporary and relative decline of power. Perhaps that is what has happened to the local societies and metropolitan 400’s of the United States. In his theory of American prestige, Thorstein Veblen, being more interested in psychological gratification, tended to overlook the social function of much of what he described. But prestige is not merely social nonsense that gratifies the individual ego: it serves, first of all, a unifying function. Many of the social phenomena with which Veblen had so much fun—in fact most ‘status behavior’—serve to mediate between the elite of various hierarchies and regions.

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Holland, ‘Social Register,’ American Mercury, June 1932. On the volumes of The Social Register published up to 1925, see Wecter, op. cit. p. 233. 14. Wecter, op. cit. p. 234. 15. As of 1940. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. Table 2. 16. See ibid. Table 14, pp. 89 ff. 17. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 235, 234. 18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953), p. 162. Cf. also my Introduction to that edition for a fuller criticism of Veblen’s theory. 19. Time, 26 October 1953. 20. See ‘Boston,’ Fortune, February 1933, p. 27. 21. Business Week, 5 June 1954, pp. 92–3. 22.

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See also ‘Corporation Life Gets a Literature,’ Business Week, 5 June 1954, p. 79. 32. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, 1896 (London: Ernest Benn, 1952), pp. 129, 130, 131. 33. In this section, I have drawn upon Harold Nicolson’s The Meaning of Prestige (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1937). 34. Gustave Le Bon, op. cit. p. 140. 35. Cf. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953). 36. Cf. John Adams, Discourses on Davila (Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1805), especially pp. 26–7, 30–34, 48–9. The subsequent quotations are from pp. 40, 28–9, and 18. 37. But see Rene Sedillot, ‘Now Medals for Civilians, Too,’ The New York Times Magazine, 24 April 1955, pp. 22 ff., for recent attempts to have honor more officially recognized. 38.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

In one of his many examples throughtout the book, he points to the efforts of the financial elite and their marketing machines to atomize people so they will be complicit in the destruction of the commons. Drawing on his expansive understanding of history, Chomsky cites the political economist Thorstein Veblen’s emphasis on “fabricating wants” in order to not only manufacture ignorance but also define consumption as the major force in shaping their needs. For Chomsky, historical memory and individual and social agency are under attack, and this is as much a pedagogical as a political issue. One of Chomsky’s most insistent themes focuses on how state power functions in various forms as a mode of terrorism inflicting violence, misery and hardship, often as a function of class warfare and American global imperialism, and how people are often complicit with such acts of barbarism.

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But the doctrine has force if we accept its unstated premise: that humans are blindly driven by what American workers, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, called “the New Spirit of the Age, Gain Wealth forgetting all but Self”—a doctrine they bitterly condemned as demeaning and destructive, an assault on the very nature of free people. Huge efforts have been devoted since to inculcating the New Spirit of the Age. Major industries are dedicated to what political economist Thorstein Veblen called “fabricating wants”—directing people to “the superficial things” of life, like “fashionable consumption,” in the words of Columbia University marketing professor Paul Nystrom. That way people can be atomized, seeking personal gain alone and diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves, act in concert and challenge authority.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View by John Kenneth Galbraith

business cycle, central bank independence, classic study, flying shuttle, full employment, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, low interest rates, means of production, planned obsolescence, price discrimination, price stability, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, War on Poverty

In the last seventy-five years, he has been mentioned only as a curiosity—an early American economist who had the fortitude to disagree with Ricardo on rent and with Adam Smith on the virtues of free trade. II The two other distinctively American figures had more enduring influence. These were Henry George and Thorstein Veblen. But so far from manifesting the exuberant attitudes of the frontier, both were prophets of a gloom that was, in some respects, more profound than that of Ricardo. Henry George (1839–1897) was, like Marx, the founder of a faith, and the faithful still assemble to do honor to their prophet. Like Adam Smith, he made clear his view of the social prospect in the title of his remarkable book: Progress and Poverty.

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III In the tradition of American popular radicalism, there were other influential figures besides Henry George—Henry Demarest Lloyd and Edward Bellamy come especially to mind as important figures of the latter decades of the last century. Their conclusions, however, were broadly similar: great inequality and great poverty were inevitable in the absence of great reform. And unlike Henry George, their words mostly died with them. There remains, however, the man whom many regard as the uniquely American economist, Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929).5 For the eager search for reassurance that followed the Ricardian gloom, Veblen substituted a grandiloquent iconoclasm. Ricardo had forecast a disagreeable fate for most of mankind. His followers hoped against hope that it might not be. Veblen took a position above the debate. The fate of man was something with which, at least for purposes of posture, he chose not to identify himself.

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However, Patten, a singularly interesting and original figure, has joined Carey in the neglect reserved for American heretics. Commons and Mitchell, as a matter of principle or method, largely avoided any overall theoretical formulation of man's economic prospect and hence contributed little to the attitudes with which we are here concerned. [back] *** 6 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1932 ed. (New York: Scribner), P. 234. [back] *** 7 The conclusions sketched above are principally developed in The Theory of Business Enterprise. The quote is on p. 183. [back] *** 8 Originally published in 1899. There is a later edition, to which I contributed an introduction, published in 1973 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

Considering the United States today, the Israeli economist Ori Heffetz has shown that the greater one’s income, the larger the share of disposable income that is devoted to buying socially visible goods.39 The workings of this mechanism were penetratingly analyzed more than a century ago by the American economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen.40 In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen argued that each social class seeks to imitate the consumption habits of the one above it in order to distance itself from the one beneath it. This idea of the invidious nature of consumption had been anticipated by Adam Smith’s notion of a human need for recognition; later it was to be echoed by the English economist Fred Hirsch’s concept of positional competition, and by the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s concept of differentiation.41 Marketing specialists are very familiar with this effect.

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Rajam, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 39. Ori Heffetz, “A Test of Conspicuous Consumption: Visibility and Income Elasticities,” Review of Economics and Statistics 93, no. 4 (2010): 1101–1117. 40. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr., New York: Penguin, 1994). 41. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; repr., London: Penguin, 2009); Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1995); Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970; repr., London: Sage, 1998). 42.

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

It has always been the sort of place where those devoted to solving some of the biggest challenges in logic, mathematics, and linguistics can find a supportive yet challenging environment.41 It’s the paradigm of the sort of practice that has emerged quickly over the past twenty years and that now dominates the scientific agenda in many fields: entrepreneurial science—the intersection of academic “pure” science and industrial technoscience.42 This technocratic mode of organization is anything but new. In The Engineers and the Price System, a book published in 1921 that fell into 68 G O OG LE’S WAYS AND MEA NS immediate obscurity, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen identified a new class of what we now call knowledge workers. In the late years of the American Industrial Revolution, Veblen saw that the increase in efficiency of the production and distribution of goods was creating tremendous wealth for the class that owned the means of production yet who were unable to do the mathematics necessary to understand the systems that enriched them.

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We must build systems that can serve us better, regardless of which companies and technologies thrive in the next decade. Most important, we should learn to beware of false idols and empty promises. The future of knowledge—and thus the future of the species—depends on getting this right. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The words of Thorstein Veblen sounded in my head as I researched and composed this book. Believe me: that was daunting and weird. I kept saying to myself as I wrote, “What would Veblen think of this?” The summer before I proposed doing a book on Google, I tried to read everything Veblen ever published. In a strange way, this whole project emerged from that experiment.

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John Paczkowski, “Google and the Evolution of Search, I: Human Evaluators,” Digital Daily, June 3, 2009, http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com. 41. Randall E. Stross, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know (New York: Free Press, 2008). 42. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 43. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983). 44. Walter Kirn, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Aptitude,” New York Times Magazine, July 5, 2009. 232 NOTES TO PAGES 69–77 45. Kevin J. Delaney, “Google Adjusts Hiring Process as Needs Grow,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2006. 46.

Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, diversified portfolio, emotional labour, equity risk premium, estate planning, eurozone crisis, family office, financial innovation, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, information asymmetry, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, liberal capitalism, mega-rich, mobile money, offshore financial centre, prudent man rule, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, web of trust, Westphalian system, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

In the defense of this wealth, knightly service through the skillful deployment of arms gave way to legal maneuvering, which became increasingly complex and innovative as industrial capital supplanted land as the primary form taken by family fortunes. By the end of the nineteenth century, the economist Thorstein Veblen was moved to observe the swift transition that had taken place during his lifetime, not only in the foundations of wealth but also in the means of keeping and growing it: “The economic basis of the leisure class, then as later, was the possession of wealth; but the methods of accumulating wealth, and the gifts required for holding it, have changed.… Simple aggression and unrestrained violence in great measure gave place to shrewd practice and chicanery, as the best approved method of accumulating wealth.”4 These changes were driven in part by the growing significance of wealth managers during the Gilded Age, and undoubtedly contributed to their advancement as a profession.

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On “irreplaceable” actors, see Palan, Murphy, and Chavagneux, Tax Havens, 12. 28. Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). See also Mitchel Abolafia, Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 29. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin, 1994 [1899]). 30. Jonathan Dunlop, “Healthy Competition,” STEP Journal, April 2008, 31. 31. Cap-Gemini, World Wealth Report. 32. William Robinson, “Social Theory and Globalization: The Rise of a Transnational State,” Theory and Society 30 (2001): 165. 33.

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Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985). 2. Katherine Rehl, “Help Your Clients Preserve Values, Tell Life Stories and Share the Voice of Their Hearts through Ethical Wills,” Journal of Practical Estate Planning 5 (2003): 17. 3. Norman Peagam, “Nine Centres Worth Finding on the Map,” Euromoney, May 1989, 4–10. 4. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009 [1899]), 155. 5. Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Security in an Insecure World (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000). 6. Greta Krippner, “The Financialization of the American Economy,” Socio-Economic Review 3 (2005): 173–208.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

In his memoir A Life in Our Times (1981), Galbraith wrote: “James Burnham, partly because he was a stalwart right-winger well out of the political mainstream and partly because he was not a certified academician, never got full credit for his contribution. In early editions of The New Industrial State I was among those in default.”6 While Burnham and Galbraith included engineers and scientists in the new elite, they were not describing a technocracy like the utopian “soviet of technicians” hoped for by the maverick economist Thorstein Veblen.7 The most important managers are private and public bureaucrats who run large national and global corporations, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. They exercise disproportionate influence in politics and society by virtue of their institutional positions in large, powerful bureaucracies.

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James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972 [1941]), p. 72. 5. George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Polemic, May 1946. 6. John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981), p. 362. 7. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921), chapter vi, “A Memorandum on a Practicable Soviet of Technicians,” pp. 138–69. 8. Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, Diploma Democracy: The Rise of Political Meritocracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 5. 9.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Jenn Shreve adds: “[T]raditional teaching methods simply can’t compete with the appeal of a commercial world of games that makes children heroes or puts the fate of Harry Potter in their hands.”36 In high-school classrooms across America, this commercialization is supported by outfits like Channel One Network that offer in-school soft “news” television complete with hard advertisements that sell at rates which rival such prime-time specials as the American football Super Bowl.37 In higher education, colleges and universities that once acted as a counterpoint to commercial culture today have gone prostrate before corporate sponsors of research that academic administrators have neither the will nor the independent funding to oppose. Higher education has always been prone to the forces of vocationalism (Thorstein Veblen wrote an angry critique in 1918). Its decline into the multiversity “knowledge factory” Clark Kerr wrote about in the 1960s only marked the beginning of its modern corporatization—about which Stanley Aronowitz on the left and Allan Bloom on the right have in their own ways vociferously complained, and about which I will comment below in my discussion of privatization.38 Today’s new higher-ed corruption comes from treating students themselves not as autonomous learners but as free consumers and not yet committed brand-shoppers—clients of educational services.

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At Woolworth’s it would always be for a predictable nickel or dime. Ford made a better car. Western Union offered more reliable communication. Baldwin made better pianos, but Chickering or Brewster made them cheaper. Sears Roebuck had more goods at better prices than Montgomery Ward (or vice versa). A critical change was underway. Thorstein Veblen saw in these developments “one of the most significant mutations in man’s history” in which industrial capital was being superceded by business capital where investment for gain overtook “commitment to industry and workmanship.”20 The Protestant ethos was morphing before the astonished eyes of newly “empowered” consumers.

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Channel One Network, originally founded by Chris Whittle (bought by 3M Corporation and owned today [2006] by Primedia), leases telecommunications equipment to more than 12,000 high schools throughout the United States. In return, it gains the right to show its soft news programming (nine minutes of teen-slanted soft “educational” news with three minutes of hard advertising) with students obliged to watch during regular class time hours. See www.channelone.com. 38. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918; reprint, with a new introduction by Ivar Berg, New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1993); Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987); Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

That is why the market’s power must be wisely embedded within public regulations, and within the wider economy, in order to define and delimit its terrain. It is also why, whenever I hear someone praising the ‘free market’, I beg them to take me there, because I’ve never seen it at work in any country that I have visited. Institutional economists – from Thorstein Veblen to Karl Polanyi – have long pointed out that markets (and hence their prices) are strongly shaped by a society’s context of laws, institutions, regulations, policies and culture. As Ha-Joon Chang writes, ‘A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.’36 From passports to medicines and AK-47s, many things cannot be legally bought or sold without official licence.

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From isolated to interdependent Depicting rational economic man as an isolated individual – unaffected by the choices of others – proved highly convenient for modelling the economy, but it was long questioned even from within the discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century, the sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen berated economic theory for depicting man as a ‘self-contained globule of desire’, while the French polymath Henri Poincaré pointed out that it overlooked ‘people’s tendency to act like sheep’.31 He was right: we are not so different from herds as we might like to imagine. We follow social norms, typically preferring to do what we expect others will do and, especially if filled with fear or doubt, we tend to go with the crowd.

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Jevons himself had a hunch that economic analysis should be dynamic but, lacking the mathematics to do it, he settled for comparative statics, which compares snapshots of two points in time: it was an unfortunate compromise because it led him away from, rather than towards, the insight he ultimately sought.13 In the 1860s, Karl Marx described how the relative income shares of workers and capitalists would continually rise and fall, due to self-perpetuating cycles of output and employment.14 By the end of the nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen was criticising economics for being ‘helplessly behind the times in not being evolutionary’ and therefore unable to explain change or development,15 while Alfred Marshall argued against mechanical metaphors and, instead, for seeing economics as ‘a branch of biology, broadly interpreted’.16 Twentieth-century attempts to recognise the economy’s inherent dynamism were likewise made by deeply opposing schools of thought but even they couldn’t dislodge equilibrium thinking.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris

colonial exploitation, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, stakhanovite, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

Many Americans seem to spend their entire lives trying to climb further up the social pyramid simply in order to impress each other. We seem to be more interested in working in order to get people to admire us for our wealth than in the actual wealth itself, which often enough consists of chromium baubles and burdensome or useless objects. It is amazing how much effort people are willing to spend to obtain what Thorstein Veblen described as the vicarious thrill of being mistaken for members of a class that doesn’t have to work. Veblen’s mordant phrases “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous waste” aptly convey a sense of the peculiarly intense desire for “keeping up with the Joneses” that lies behind the ceaseless cosmetic alterations in the automotive, appliance, and clothing industries.

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. • Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Chicago: Aldine (1971). • Jane Boss and Eric Ross, unpublished papers and personal communications. • Some of the ideas in this chapter were first published in my column in Natural History magazine in May 1972. POTLATCH Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Modern Library (1934). • Franz Boas, “The Social Organization of the Kwakiutl.” American Anthropologist 22 (1920), pp. 111–126. • Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture. New York: Mentor (1946). • Douglas Oliver. A Solomon Islands Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1955). • Ian Hogbin, A Guadalcanal Society: The Kaoka Speakers.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

“Clinton seems to always be in a hurry,” The Boston Globe reported, noting that “she requested ‘prestaged’ group photos so she wouldn’t have to wait ‘for these folks to get their act together.’ The former first lady ‘doesn’t like to stand around waiting for people,’ UCLA was told.” Then there is the social prestige of conspicuous consumption, identified by sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 masterpiece The Theory of the Leisure Class. The flaunting of wealth and leisure that he defined as conspicuous consumption includes the status symbol of servants, as the wealthy have always known. The DNY lifestyle embraces an ideal that dates to the pharaohs. In his 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder explains how domestic help can facilitate increased consumption: “The average person can afford no more personal services than he could in the Stone Age.

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In 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert published a thoughtful essay in The New Yorker that reflected on Keynes’ forecasts in a review of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte, a book, Kolbert wrote, that “explores why it is that twenty-first-century Americans feel so swamped.” Schulte advances several theories to explain the disappearance of leisure. One is that leisure has lost its cachet. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), sociologist Thorstein Veblen argued that conspicuous leisure, like conspicuous consumption, allowed the privileged to establish, confirm, and announce their elite status. Just as lawns were originally a status symbol proving that a landowner was prosperous enough to devote acreage to merely scenic plantings, conspicuous leisure advertised the fact that the aristocrat could expend hours, even days and weeks, on nonproductive activities like fox hunting.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

This is not just anecdotal evidence collected from one woman on one day riding one train. Complaining about how little time we have has become one of the most common activities of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Researchers noted the change years ago and began investigating the phenomenon of busyness as status symbol. In 1899, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen published his hugely influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it, he remarked that one of the most powerful indicators of personal success was “conspicuous abstention from labor.” Veblen might be very surprised to see that over the ensuing one hundred years, idleness came to mean not success but poverty.

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“The biggest gift that the United States could get”: Larry Light, “Why Holiday Shopping Is So Important for the U.S. Economy,” CBS News, November 28, 2016. “The answer to America’s economic problems”: Roger Simmermaker, “Why Buying American Can Save the U.S. Economy,” New York Times, September 16, 2011. “conspicuous abstention from labor”: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 3, “Conspicuous Leisure,” p. 30. someone wearing a Bluetooth headset: Silvia Bellezza, Neeru Paharia, and Anat Keinan, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” Journal of Consumer Research, June 2017.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Why do they invariably gravitate to the same set of selective colleges even though they, their parents, and their high school college counselors decry the application process? The rankings competition among colleges is supposed to benefit students, not hurt them. When it doesn’t, one would expect the intended beneficiaries to simply walk away. One possible explanation is status. Status competition, the economist Thorstein Veblen observed in 1899, has long preoccupied the leisure class. Wherever prep school families congregate, one generally sees large dogs, Nantucket Reds, and European cars. Though bumper stickers are considered lowbrow in these settings and are therefore rare among such families, another kind of signifier is quite common: banners in the rear windows of their vehicles that proclaim their offspring’s progression through elite educational institutions beginning with prep school through to college and graduate school.

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But if that were the case, personal savings, investments, and frugality would be a lot higher and consumption much lower than they currently are around the world. Instead, what counts is evidence of our wealth relative to our peers. To win this game, we must not only outearn our peers, but outspend them as well through conspicuous leisure and consumption. As the economist Thorstein Veblen observed in his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class, “wealth or power must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.”61 In recent years, social networks have upped the stakes in our status competition. We no longer try to keep up with the Joneses next door. Thanks to Facebook, Instagram, and other ubiquitous forms of social media, we’re now engaged in a competition with smiling acquaintances around the globe who seem to make more money, work at dream jobs, own fancier cars, go on better vacations, live in nicer homes, and have kids who seem to attend more prestigious schools than our own.

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Den Nieuwenboer and Muel Kaptein, “Spiraling Down into Corruption: A Dynamic Analysis of the Social Identity Processes That Cause Corruption in Organizations to Grow,” Journal of Business Ethics 83, no. 2 (December 2008): 133, 138–39, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9617-8 (discussing how “performing well through corruption will automatically increase the threat to identity, starting a self-perpetuating spiral of increasing pressures to commit corruption” and a “cross-level field study among 187 employees from 35 groups in 20 organizations . . . showed that the level of corruption exhibited by an individual was positively related to the level of corruption exhibited by their co-workers”). 61.Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 36. Indeed, Veblen predicted that as communities become larger and have greater turnover as mobility increases, then the utility of conspicuous consumption will increase relative to conspicuous leisure. 62.Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 32 (“[S]ince the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible”). 63.T.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Jean Tirole, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, litecoin, low interest rates, machine translation, market bubble, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, moral hazard, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, publish or perish, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, yellow journalism, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Less than one-tenth of 1% of ProQuest News & Newspapers hits for American Dream since King’s “I Have a Dream” speech mention James Truslow Adams, but 3% mention Martin Luther King, Jr. Ultimately, the generally accepted narrative of the American Dream includes a wish for prosperity for everyone, framing it in a way that makes it seem not commercial or selfish. It turns upside down Thorstein Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption undertaken solely to prove one’s superiority. As a result, the American Dream became extremely useful in pitches for consumer products that encourage potential purchasers to feel better about their purchases, such as a new home or a second car. In fact, ProQuest News & Newspapers shows that more than half the use of the phrase American Dream has occurred in advertisements rather than articles.

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This new narrative became associated with two new words that left ordinary people out of the economic picture: technocracy, a society that is commanded by technicians, and technocrat, one of these now-powerful technicians. These words weren’t new to the 1930s. They had been used occasionally in the 1920s to refer to a theory that the government should be run by scientists who could assure world peace. Thorstein Veblen had written a book, The Engineers and the Price System, during the previous depression, 1920–21, that envisioned a world run by a “soviet of technicians.” But the words took on a new meaning with the explosion and duration of unemployment by the early 1930s. A Columbia University group with revolutionary pretensions called itself “Technocracy.”

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Instead, he seems to think just the opposite, for he says, if inequality is someday reduced: “With this abolition of want and the fear of want, the admiration of riches would decay, and men would seek the respect and approbation of their fellows in other modes than by the acquisition and display of wealth” (George, 1886 [1879], chap. 4). One might also expect to see some recognition of moderation, in the extended depression of the 1890s, in Thorstein Veblen’s influential 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book that coined the term “conspicuous consumption.” But a new modesty with that depression is not mentioned. Indeed, the panic of 1893 and the ensuing depression are not even mentioned in that book. Veblen, too, seems to think just the opposite, writing, “Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life, may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the individual in the pecuniary culture” (Veblen, 1899, chap. 9). 2.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forced them into an organization that conquered the world.” In 1926 bookstores sold more copies of The Man Nobody Knows than of any other nonfiction book. On the other hand, there was a literary assault on bourgeois values and a flourishing bohemian alternative in Greenwich Village and elsewhere. During this period such writers as Sinclair Lewis, Thorstein Veblen, John O’Hara, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein rejected bourgeois values, going off to Paris or Moscow, engaging in radical politics, or otherwise railing against the rise of provincial Babbittry. Malcolm Cowley, a Greenwich Village habitué who was also a writer and editor, summarized the priorities of early-20th-century American bohemians in his 1934 book, Exile’s Return.

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This new set of codes organizes the consumption patterns of the educated class, encouraging some kinds of spending, which are deemed virtuous, and discouraging others that seem vulgar or elitist. They redefine what it means to be a cultured person. Taken as a whole, this set of rules make it clear that the Thorstein Veblen era is over. Maybe off in Vegas there are still some rich peasants trying to conspicuously consume, buying big limousines, powerboats, and sports franchises and piling up possessions to demonstrate their net worth. But the Bobo renounces accumulation and embraces cultivation. He must show, in the way he spends his money, that he is conscientious and not crass.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Law enforcers have not yet concluded the Damour manslaughter case, but reports indicate that there were “so many contributing causes to this tragedy” that it will be difficult to assign individual blame. No matter who is to blame for the incident, Damour’s terrible end is a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large—a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and plowing down people simply to buy more stuff. Hyper-Consumption Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian economist and sociologist, first coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in 1899.1 He used the term to describe the nouveau riche, a class emerging during the nineteenth century made up of people eager to display their wealth and social power. They spent lavishly on visible goods such as jewelry and clothing to show they were prosperous and to differentiate themselves from the masses.

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The notion of “having driving up the wanting” is discussed in Clive Hamilton, Growth Fetish (Allen & Unwin, 2003). 46. Susan Fournier and Michael Guiry, “An Emerald Green Jaguar, a House on Nantucket and an African Safari: Wish Lists and Consumption Dreams in Materialist Society,” Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993), 352–358. 1. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (The Macmillan Company, 1899). 2. Robert Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Yale University Press, 2000), 176. 3. Clive Hamilton, “The Social Roots of the Environmental Crisis,” www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/starkey/ECN398%20-Ecology,%20Economy,%20Society/Starkey_Micro_2e_c10.pdf 4.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

We need to distinguish, as already suggested, between the full-scale imitation of a single orthodox model, monitored (not imposed) by judgemental foreigners, and the ordinary learning by which states vicariously profit from each other’s experiences.24 The former engenders resentment, while the latter, usually ascribed to the demonstration effect of perceived successes and failures, does not. Second, and even more importantly, we should separate the imitation of means from the imitation of goals. We call the former borrowing rather than imitation. A classic formulation of this distinction was articulated by the great economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen, who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century that the Japanese had borrowed ‘the industrial arts’ of the West but not the West’s ‘spiritual outlook’ or its ‘principles of conduct and ethical values’.25 Borrowing technical means does not affect identity, at least not in the short term, while imitating moral ends cuts deeper and can initiate a much more radically transformative process, veering close to a ‘conversion experience’.

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Not only can the imitative impulse coexist with inventiveness, as Tarde concedes, but under ordinary circumstances imitation can make an important contribution to creativity and originality. Cf. Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. Wade Jacoby, Imitation and Politics: Redesigning Modern Germany (Cornell University Press, 2000). 25. Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Opportunity of Japan’, Journal of Race Development 6:1 (July 1915), pp. 23–38. 26. Trapped in its economics-centred understanding of politics, Brussels finds messianic provincialism in Budapest and Warsaw easy to ridicule but almost impossible to understand. For European bureaucrats, the fact that Poland and Hungary are among the greatest net beneficiaries of EU funding has made their revolt against the EU seem totally irrational.

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

Customized contacts with workers are a major part of what clients are paying for in many luxury sites, including high-end hotels, restaurants, spas, resorts, retail shops, and first-class airline cabins. However, the limited sociological literature on hotels and other service industry organizations has rarely focused on luxury.2 And few sociologists since Thorstein Veblen, over a century ago, have investigated the luxury sector at all, let alone luxury service specifically.3 To understand luxury service, I decided I needed to participate in its production, which led me to conduct twelve months of ethnography in two luxury hotels. Based on the data I gathered and on interviews I conducted, this book looks at how managers, guests, and interactive workers negotiated unequal entitlement to resources, recognition, and labor as they produced and consumed luxury service.

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Again, the guest is given the sense of unlimited entitlement in the fulfillment of her needs. “Pampering”: Displays of Labor Another key element of luxury service, though it is not explicitly acknowledged as such either in the industry or among hotel guests, is the guest’s entitlement to workers’ physical labor—what some guests refer to as “pampering.” Thorstein Veblen saw both abstention from labor and consumption of the labor of others as markers of the leisure class.36 He would not have been surprised to find that guests in the luxury hotel are entitled both to avoid working themselves and to benefit from the unlimited labor of workers. But this available labor is not only physical; it also has an emotional dimension, indicating “care” to guests, just as a mother’s preparation of dinner indicates love for her family.37 I call these offerings “displays of labor”; they can involve visible human work or simply markers of labor.

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She contrasted herself to her ex-husband, who had been raised with money but had never found a way to enjoy it, whereas she had grown up in a poor family. Christina, a young leisure traveler, said her husband always stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, in a suite; she told me, “He just wants it because he grew up staying in Holiday Inns, and he likes the fact that he can do it.” Thorstein Veblen might have seen luxury hotels as sites of “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure,” in which individuals parade their consumption and their free time in order to obtain status.6 But guests seemed to prefer not to see them that way.7 Contradicting the idea that they were pursuing status rewards, several leisure travelers I interviewed claimed they did not always tell their friends or families which hotels they had chosen, for fear they would find spending on such hotels excessively extravagant.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

He must have felt that he had truly arrived. The original head of what was then the Department of Political Economy at Chicago (now the Department of Economics) was James Laurence Laughlin, a staunch economic conservative and follower of John Stuart Mill. Laughlin presided over a diverse and eclectic department. Thorstein Veblen—perhaps the most famous American economist (and possibly the most famous economist in the world) in the first quarter of the twentieth century—had been at Chicago first as a fellow and then as a member of the faculty. Wesley Mitchell, a student and then a young faculty member at Chicago, called its early Department of Political Economy “perhaps the most stimulating group of scholars in the country, certainly the group with the most varied traditions.”2 The transition of the name of the department at Chicago, which occurred early in the twentieth century and reflected a broader trend at other colleges and universities, indicates the changing conception that economists had of their discipline.

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“In the history of economics,” John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “the age of John Maynard Keynes gave way to the age of Milton Friedman.”1 It is an indication of the tendency of paradigms and views of the world to change and even to collapse that two economists who would have been considered in absolutely the first tier for half of the twentieth century (from about 1900 to 1930 and from 1950 to 1970), Thorstein Veblen and Galbraith, are now considered very differently. Though it is as certain as certain can be that the future will look on the present very differently than the present looks on itself, this is, for whatever reasons, among the most difficult of lessons to learn and to internalize. It is nonetheless among the most important.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

They aren’t looking for places to raise their families or to do productive work. Instead, they’re looking for safe places to park their money. If luxury real estate was the most obvious way to measure and display wealth as “conspicuous consumption” around the turn of the twentieth century, when Thorstein Veblen coined the term, it has become something more mundane today—a new class of economic asset used to store and grow wealth.10 The broader evidence indicates that New York and London do have considerable shares of the world’s wealthiest people, the former leading in the location of billionaires, the latter in the location of multimillionaires.

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Housing News Report, September 2015, https://issuu.com/ftmagazine/docs/housingnewsreport_sept; Saskia Sassen, “Who Owns Our Cities—and Why This Urban Takeover Should Concern Us All,” The Guardian, November 24, 2015, www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/24/who-owns-our-cities-and-why-this-urban-takeover-should-concern-us-all. 10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994 [1899]). 11. Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Isabel Ritchie, The Geography of the Global Super-Rich (Toronto: Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 2016), http://martinprosperity.org/media/The-Geography-of-the-Global-Super-Rich.pdf.

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century by Jonathan Sacks

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, Socratic dialogue, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

Heinrich Heine called baptism his ‘entrance-ticket to European culture’. Jewish intellectuals in the age of antisemitism were, in effect, secular Marranos. They hid their identity. In some cases—again Marx and Wittgenstein are examples—they overcompensated by developing attitudes that were hardly less than antisemitic. In an essay published in 1919, Thorstein Veblen wrote about the intellectually gifted Jew that he (or she) achieved intellectual independence ‘only at the cost of losing his secure place in the scheme of conventions into which he has been born, and at the cost, also, of finding no similarly secure place in that scheme of gentile conventions into which he is thrown’.

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Chapter 10: Torah and Wisdom: Judaism and the World 1 See Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, New York, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 252–3. 2 William Rees-Mogg, The Reigning Error: The Crisis of World Inflation, London, Hamilton, 1974, p. 11. 3 Thorstein Veblen, ‘The intellectual preeminence of Jews in modern Europe’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1, March 1919, pp. 33–42. 4 Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1989. 5 See Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, Notre Dame, Ind., University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. 6 J.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Particular kinds of clothes and other goods simultaneously signal that an individual belongs to one group and keep others at a distance. This is a very old view, going back to the ancients, but perhaps its most influential version today is the notion of ‘conspicuous consumption’, a term made famous just over a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in his critique of the American rich and their flashy display of luxury.21 Since people want to be loved and admired, such luxury enjoyed by the few causes envy and emulation by the many, triggering a race in which no one wants to be left behind. This view of human behaviour remains the single most dominant strand in popular debates about affluence, shopping binges and debt.

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Like Marshall, Hobson believed that people would not just consume more, but better. Gambling, racecourses and the ‘flash music-hall’ were the cultural byproducts of imperialism and inequality. The lower classes aped the manners of financiers and aristocrats; Hobson admired the American economist Thorstein Veblen, who who had attacked the luxurious lifestyles of the American rich as a form of social waste, and would meet him in Washington, DC, in 1925. Together, Hobson hoped, social welfare and free trade would purify the air. Ordinary Britons would ‘begin to demand better commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious’.

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Unlike for many later critics of ‘consumerism’, for Taut the problem was not that of a ‘throwaway society’. It was that people were not throwing away enough. One person’s attic became another one’s living room. The diffusion of goods around 1900 disrupted established codes of status. Accumulation and display were a way to reassert social hierarchies. In 1899, the heterodox Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen christened this phenomenon ‘conspicuous consumption’. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he focused primarily on the super-rich and their use of costly entertainments and fine arts to distinguish themselves from those below. For the elite, ‘vicarious consumption’ was a way to assert their high station in life at a time when goods were becoming available to the many.18 The pivotal figure in this competitive game was the lady of the house.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

War on Poverty: See, e.g., “Johnson State of Union Address Provides Budget $97.9 Billion, War on Poverty, Atomic Cutback,” New York Times, January 9, 1964, accessed August 11, 2018, www.nytimes.com/1964/01/09/archives/johnson-state-of-union-address-provides-budget-of-979-billion-war.html. Thorstein Veblen: John Patrick Diggins, Thorstein Veblen: Theorist of the Leisure Class (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 33, 135. “are by custom exempt”: Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 1. “a steady application”: Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 8. “music, or diversion, or conversation”: See Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed.

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Difficult, but not impossible. A clear-eyed understanding of meritocracy unmasks its claim to tie advantage to desert. The first steps on the path to understanding come from studying the working rich: who they are, and how they make their money. FROM LEISURE TO INDUSTRY The great sociologist Thorstein Veblen puts the working rich into historical context. Veblen was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in the summer of 1929, literally on the eve of the Great Depression, which would eventually destroy the order he so shrewdly described. He made the old elite the subject of his acidly observed sociology of wealth from the turn of the twentieth century, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

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Hereafter cited as Voth, “The Longest Years.” exceeded fifty hours: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1945 (Washington, DC, 1949), 67, accessed May 24, 2018, www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/HistoricalStatisticsoftheUnitedStates1789-1945.pdf. the elite despised industry: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 19. Hereafter cited as Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class. how hard they worked: This formulation borrows from Voth, “The Longest Years,” 1066, 1075. two generations ago: See Chapter 6. high school degree or less: See Steven F.

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

In their quick and vehement answers, you will hear the power of what has come to be called identity shopping. SIGNALING SUCCESS While few car buyers like to admit that status motivates their purchases, consumer experts like marketing executive Wendy Wahl agree that “conspicuous consumption” is still alive and well in the twenty-first century. When this term was coined by social scientist Thorstein Veblen at the dawn of the twentieth century, he was describing how America’s then tiny 58 Carjacked upper class consumed “freely and of the best” products in order to telegraph their wealth and social superiority.23 But according to Wahl and other marketers, conspicuous consumption has become more pervasive in our current era of “mass affluence.”

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Jennifer Aaker, “The Malleable Self: The Role of Self-Expression in Persuasion,” Journal of Marketing Research, 1999, 36 (1): 45–57. Ibid. Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 3. NOTES 22. 23. 24. 233 Ibid., p. 10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994 [1912]), p. 64. Income figures are from Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Update with 2007 Estimates),” August 5, 2009. http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2007.xls.

100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War Over Socialisation by Frank Furedi

1960s counterculture, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, behavioural economics, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, lockdown, New Urbanism, nocebo, nudge theory, nudge unit, scientific management, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, work culture

. → Dowbiggin, I. (2011) The Quest For Mental Health: A Tale of Science, Medicine, Scandal, Sorrow, and Mass Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. a, b Dunn, R.G. (1998) Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. a, b Eby, C.V. (1994) ‘Thorstein Veblen and the rhetoric of authority’, American Quarterly, 46(2), 139 – 173. → Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2019) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, London: Routledge. → Editorial (1963) ‘Diagnosis of a sick society’, British Medical Journal, 1(5324), 97. → Eisenstadt, S.N. (1963) ‘Archetypal patterns of youth’, in Erikson, E.H.

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Hayek (1952) The Counter-revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, Glencoe: Free Press, p.87. 501 Hayek (1952) p.94. 502 Habermas [1967] (1987) pp. 75, 81. 503 Kessen (1979) p.818. 504 T.L. Haskell [1977] (2000) The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p.87. 505 C.V. Eby (1994) ‘Thorstein Veblen and the rhetoric of authority’, American Quarterly, 46(2), 139 – 173, at 152. 506 E.A. Ross (1906) ‘The nation’s need of moral experts’, Current Literature (1888 – 1912), vol. XLI, p.93. 507 H. Kuhlmann (2005) ‘Walden Two: a behaviorist utopia’, in Living Walden Two: B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communities, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, p.30. 508 Chisholm (1946) p.9. 509 A.

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Today, the condition of being around a lot of other people adds to metropolitan expense via congestion, and the cost of competition for scarce public and private resources (the parks are crowded, and the best shows sell out quickly). What could possibly make city life worth the expense? Maybe it’s all for show. It could be that cities are what economists call Veblen goods, after economist Thorstein Veblen. A Veblen good has an unusual property -- as its price rises, demand for it also rises. Why? Because it functions as a status symbol. Wealthy Americans could choose to pay high prices for city life because city life is like a Rolex watch or a $10,000 bottle of wine: it shows that you've got money.

Decline of the English Murder by George Orwell

British Empire, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois

Seneca On the Shortness of Life Marcus Aurelius Meditations St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner Thomas à Kempis The Inner Life Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince Michel de Montaigne On Friendship Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome Thomas Paine Common Sense Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World John Ruskin On Art and Life Charles Darwin On Natural Selection Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents George Orwell Why I Write Confucius The First Ten Books Sun-tzu The Art of War Plato The Symposium Lucretius Sensation and Sex Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness Francis Bacon Of Empire Thomas Hobbes Of Man Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry David Hume On Suicide Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy Blaise Pascal Human Happiness Adam Smith The Invisible Hand Edmund Burke The Evils of Revolution Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself Leo Tolstoy A Confession William Morris Useful Work v.

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

For a discussion on the rise of corporations in America, see, for example, William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). 7. The classic statement remains Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking Press, 1938), first published in 1921, and Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New York: Viking Press, 1954), first published in 1923. See also Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), and Merle Curti, “The Changing Concept of Human Nature in the Literature of American Advertising,” Business History Review 41:4 (winter 1967): 346; Matthew P.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Henry George (1839–1897) has been called America’s most important home-grown economist; his writings explored the implications of the principle that each person should own what he or she creates, but that everything found in nature, most importantly land, should belong equally to all humanity.38 Economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) criticized the wastefulness of consumption for status.39 More recently, the book Small Is Beautiful by German-British economist E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) inspired Bob Swann (an American pioneer of land trusts) to found the E. F. Schumacher Society, which is now the New Economics Institute, one of several US organizations that promote a basic restructuring of the economy according to ecological principles.40 If growth is impossible to sustain, what alternative goal should economies pursue?

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston, 1854); Scott Nearing and Helen Nearing, Living the Good Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). 37. Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York: HarperCollins, 1981); Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992). 38. Henry George, Progress and Poverty (New York: Doubleday, 1879); The Henry George Institute. 39. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899). 40. Some other organizations and websites include the New Economics Institute, Capital Institute, New Economics Foundation, Third Millennium Economy, Real World Economics, paecon.net/PAEReview/, and ethicalmarkets.com. 41.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

This group of economists are known as the Institutionalist school – or the Old Institutional Economics (OIE), in recognition of the emergence of the so-called New Institutional Economics (NIE) since the 1980s. Individuals are shaped by society: the rise of the Institutionalist school The emergence of the Institutionalist school can be traced back to Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), who made his name for questioning the notion of the rational, self-seeking individual. He argued that humans have layers of motivations behind their behaviours – instinct, habit, belief and, only finally, reason. Veblen also emphasized that human rationality cannot be defined as a timeless thing but is shaped by the social environment, made up of institutions – formal rules (e.g., laws, internal rules of companies) and informal rules (e.g., social customs, conventions in business dealings) – that surround the particular individuals that we are observing.

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* Thereby reducing its Gini coefficient to o, as it will be a perfectly equal society – of one person. * Poverty rates were 6.4 per cent in Iceland, 7.2 per cent in Luxembourg and 7.3 per cent in Finland. They were 17.4 per cent in the US, 16.0 per cent in Japan and 15.4 per cent in Spain. * The term has become famous in economics thanks to The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (whom we met in Chapter 4), a savage critique of what he called conspicuous consumption (consumption to show off one’s wealth, rather than for the pleasure of it). * The ILO defines child labour as children under the age of fifteen (or twelve, for some jobs) doing jobs that hamper their physical development and education, thereby excluding cases such as children helping with domestic chores or doing paper rounds

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man (1971), quoted in Cohen and Taylor, Escape nineteenth-century campaign against popular amusements Robert W. Malcolmson Popular Recreations in English Society 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 70. Lee Benson The Concept ofJacksonian Democracy (New York: Atheneum , " Ill , , , 1964) p. 201. Attempts, p. 184. , 112 Thorstein Veblen The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Modern Library, 1934 [1899]), p. 256. 112 Goodhart and Chataway War vnthout Weapons pp. 4-5, 28-29. "In most countries the 'Bourgeoisie' . . . major portion of your energies 113 . Challenge without , 226-27, 233, 238, 240. V , , Morris Dickstein, Gates cfEden (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 219-20,

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. , " , 131 Michael Cheval ier. Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States: Letters on 133 North America (New York: Doubleday, 1961 [1838]), ch. 34. Veblen on industrial discipline 141 Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes (New York: Random House 1968), pp. 6-7. 142 Kenneth B. Clark et al. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner's, " 1904), ch. 9, "The Cultural Incidence of the Machine Process. Eastman, NAM on industrial education . , books, 1964 [1785]), pp. 139-40, 142. 134 Spring, Tbe Sorting Machine: National Educational Policy since 194! (New York: David McKay 1976), pp. 18-21.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

This is indeed one of the important differences between, on the one hand, classical and social-democratic capitalisms, and on the other, liberal meritocratic capitalism (see Table 2.1, row 4). The perception and reality of classical capitalism was that capitalists (what I call here capital-abundant individuals) were all very rich but typically did not receive much income from labor; in the extreme case, they received no income from labor at all. It is no accident that Thorstein Veblen labeled them the “leisure class.” Correspondingly, laborers received no income from capital at all. Their income came entirely from labor.7 In this case there was a perfect division of society into capitalists and workers, with both sides receiving zero income from the other factor of production.

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The structuralists in Latin America have been arguing since the 1960s that one of the reasons why the savings rate in Latin American countries is low is that the rich are unwilling to save lest their consumption pattern be seen as falling below that of their (richer) North American counterparts. Thorstein Veblen made a similar point in his writings about conspicuous consumption of luxury goods—that the wastefulness of consumption deflected the funds from more productive uses, but that wastefulness itself was the objective sought after.35 Much further back, Machiavelli zeroed in on the same idea, namely, that relations with richer neighbors stimulate corruption: The goodness is the more to be admired in these days in that it is so rare.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

It seemed to him that the leisure class “contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilisation … Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.”38 He thought no one should be obliged to work more than four hours a day, leaving people free to devote themselves to the arts, sciences, literature, and economics. The problem is that looking at the lifestyles of the well-to-do is not particularly revealing. For one thing, there is a tendency to romanticize how wisely they actually spent (or spend) their days. Thorstein Veblen, whose theory of conspicuous consumption mocked how prosperous people in Victorian Britain spent their money (“in order to be reputable it must be wasteful”), also poked fun at how they occupied their free time—what he called “conspicuous leisure.”39 For them, it was not enough to be seen wasting income on garish superfluities; they had to be seen wasting their time as well.

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,” prepared for the “Work in the Future” symposium, 6 February 2018, organized by Robert Skidelsky. 36.  Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, p. 368. 37.  Leontief, “National Perspective,” p. 7. 38.  Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3 and 13. 39.  Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1994). 40.  G. A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (London: Harvard University Press, 2001). 41.  See http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/victorian/religion/ (accessed 24 April 2018). 42.  

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

“Not at all,” replied the farmer. “I’m pretty happy because my damned neighbor has lost his wife and all his children too!” The economic analysis of pride and envy—particularly in the context of social status and conspicuous consumption—came to the fore in the work of the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, whose 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, explained the toxic consequences of these attitudes.32 In 1977, the British economist Fred Hirsch published The Social Limits to Growth,33 in which he introduced the idea of positional goods. A positional good is anything—it could be a car, a house, an Olympic medal, an education, an income, or an accent—that derives its perceived value not just from its intrinsic benefits but also from its relative properties, including the properties of scarcity and being superior to someone else’s.

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In reality, pride and envy typically apply not to differences in well-being but to differences in visible aspects thereof, such as status and possessions. Bob’s hard toil in acquiring his possessions (which lowers his overall well-being) may not be visible to Alice. This can lead to the self-defeating behaviors that go under the heading of “keeping up with the Joneses.” 32. On the sociology of conspicuous consumption: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Macmillan, 1899). 33. Fred Hirsch, The Social Limits to Growth (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 34. I am indebted to Ziyad Marar for pointing me to social identity theory and its importance in understanding human motivation and behavior.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

For a small group, wealth provided social acceptance, power, and influence. It became a means for self-expression, a statement of status and selfhood. As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They have more money.”2 In his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-born American economist, created the term conspicuous consumption, meaning the waste of money or resources by people to establish higher status. Conspicuous leisure was the waste of time by people to achieve the same thing. By the late twentieth century, it was unnecessary even to spend money on useless things and wasteful pursuits.

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In a quiet steady voice, she explained the hardships that the loss had caused. She wanted to know “whether there was any chance she would see any of her money before her life ended.” 3. Business of Business In 1922 U.S. President Calvin Coolidge famously observed: “The business of America is business.” The economist Thorstein Veblen saw a clear difference between industry, producing things, and business, making money from producing things. In the age of capital, business rapidly financialized. Originally, business people invested in factories and businesses that produced and sold things. Now, in the twentieth century, business people sought to make money in ways not necessarily directly linked to the making of things.

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Where investing in hedge funds, diversification makes no sense, earning average or worse returns. The investor pays a fee to the FoF manager (1 percent of AUM and 10 percent of performance) as well as the hedge fund manager’s fee (2 percent and 20 percent). FoF might stand for “fee-of-fees.” Skewed payoffs for the manager encourage aggressive risk taking.18 The economist Thorstein Veblen identified this: “It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.” In 2007, three hedge fund managers took home more than $1 billion. At the congressional inquiry into the industry, Maryland Democratic representative Elijah Cummings reported that his neighbor asked him: “How does it feel to be going before five folks that have gotten more money than God?”

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Yet at the very moment when economists were in broad agreement that government or corporate planning of the markets was the only way to solve the crisis of capitalism, another, more acceptable solution began to emerge. It depended critically upon the new, hybrid way of owning the earth. The solution was half-apparent in the phrase “conspicuous consumption” used by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class published in 1899. Veblen coined the term as a jibe against the bloated plutocrats who flaunted their wealth by their “unremitting demonstration of the ability to pay.” But even at that date, the availability of credit was enabling white-collared, half-propertied wage slaves to do much the same, albeit on a reduced scale.

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Although muted by the 1930s depression, the economy that grew up around the home would galvanize the production of steel plants and plastic factories, transport and energy suppliers, and the provision of financial, marketing, and advertising services. By the end of the century, the consumer economy, a sector in its infancy when Harding drew attention to it, was responsible for about 70 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States. In the opinion of a stream of economic commentators, from Thorstein Veblen at the beginning of the century to J. K. Galbraith near its end, it also provided one answer to industrial capitalism’s crisis of overproduction. “When a family buys a home, the ripple effect is enormous,” President Clinton explained in 1995. “It means new homeowner consumers. They need more durable goods, like washers and dryers, refrigerators and water heaters.

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“part of the Greater Britain”: quoted in Belchin, Replenishing the Earth, 481. “a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear”: Alan Greenspan’s defense of monopolies appeared in a paper given at the Antitrust Seminar of the National Association of Business Economists, Cleveland, September 25, 1961. “conspicuous consumption”: In Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. Fairford, United Kindom: Echo, 2007, 33–36, and ch. 4 passim. “It’s part of him. . . .”: in The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997), 35. Chapter Seventeen: State Capitalism The birth of the new Prussia: German reform, see History of Germany 1780–1919: The Long Nineteenth Century by David Blackbourn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 81–84.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Most of the profits made from forming trusts, however, fell to the denizens of Wall Street.8 The trick was to acquire a company on leverage, ‘water’ the stock (increase its capitalization), merge operations with other concerns and float the amalgamated business at a higher price on the stock market.9 Investors were provided with cheap stock loans to boost demand for the shares at the IPO. In his Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), Thorstein Veblen claimed that the managers of public companies had become versed in the arts of stock manipulation: the certainty of gain … seems rather more assured in the large-scale manipulation of vendible [i.e., traded] capital than in business management … Indeed, so secure and lucrative is this class of business, that it is chiefly out of gains accruing, directly and indirectly, from such traffic in vendible capital that the great modern fortunes are being accumulated.10 In an influential book, Finance Capital, published in 1910, Rudolf Hilferding came up with the concept of the ‘promoter’s profit’.

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Corporate finance took precedence over ordinary business operations as the financial operations within firms accounted for an increasing share of profits.45 As one commentator put it, ‘the productive activities of the modern corporation are therefore incidental to the restructuring of corporate balance sheets and the making of money by buying and selling subsidiaries.’46 Thorstein Veblen would have understood what was going on. General Motors was once the epitome of US industry. As the car maker’s post-war CEO Charlie Wilson commented, ‘what was good for our country was good for General Motors.’ Half a century later, General Motors was an emblem of this financialization. Prior to the financial crisis, the Detroit car manufacturer ran a mortgage business (GMAC) that specialized in subprime lending and spent tens of billions of dollars repurchasing shares.47 A month after Lehman’s failure, GM filed for bankruptcy – an event induced as much by pension liabilities as falling car sales.

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Hadley, ‘The relation between interest and profits’, Publications of the American Economic Association, 9 (1), January 1894. 6. J. A. Hobson, The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production [1894] (London, 1954), p. 190. 7. George Edwards, The Evolution of Finance Capitalism (London, 1938), p. 186. 8. See Lawson, Frenzied Finance. 9. Ibid., p. 26. 10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1965), pp. 82–3. 11. Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study in the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development [1910] (London, 2006), p. 6. 12. Brandeis, Other People’s Money, p. 113. 13. Edwards, Evolution of Finance Capitalism, p. 182. 14.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

do well by doing good, full employment, means of production, Mount Scopus, plutocrats, South of Market, San Francisco, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom

In areas like Hunters Point boys didn't grow up looking up to the man who had a solid job working for some company or for the city, because there weren't enough people who had such jobs. It seemed like nobody was going to make it by working, so the king was the man who made out best by not working, by not sitting all day under the Man's bitch box. And Thorstein Veblen wrote that at the very bottom of the class system, down below the "working class" and the "honest poor," there was a "spurious aristocracy," a leisure class of bottom dogs devoted to luxury and aristocratic poses. And there you have him, the pimp. The pimp is the dude who wears the $150 Sly Stone-style vest and pants outfit from the haberdasheries on Polk and the $35 Lester Chambers-style four-inch-brim and black beaver fedora and the thin nylon socks with the vertical stripes and drives the customized sun-roof Eldorado with the Jaguar radiator cap.

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

By the same token, rundown nineteenth-century houses and small shops are appealing to many people with middle-class cultural tastes because they embody the aesthetic distinction of objects that are, on the one hand, simple, handmade tokens of craftsmanship and, on the other, living history. As Thorstein Veblen said more than a hundred years ago, these quirky marks of distinction are cast into relief by the sameness of mass production. And as the journalist David Brooks says today, the “gentry” don’t want “opulent, luxurious, … magnificent and extravagant,” they want “authentic, natural, warm, … honest, organic, … unique.”

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Edmond Jephcott (New York: Urizen, 1978), pp. 22–29; Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 74; Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003). 27. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris (New York: Viking, 1986); Robert Darnton, “Finding a Lost Prince of Bohemia,” New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008, pp. 44–48. 28. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 83, emphasis added. Also see David Ley, “Artists, Aestheticization and the Field of Gentrification,” Urban Studies 40 (2003): 2527–44; Mike Featherstone, “The Aestheticization of Everyday Life,” in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991), pp. 65–82. 29.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

‘Economic rationality needed continually to raise the level of consumption without raising the rate of satisfaction; to push back the frontier of the sufficient, to maintain the impression that there could not be enough for everyone.’ The stratification of consumption, in which the consumerism of an affluent and parasitic leisure class called the shots and led the way, became crucial to ensuring the realisation of value. This is what Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, published back in 1899, so brilliantly exposed. But what we now know is that if such a class did not already exist it would have to be invented.8 An alienating consumerism is needed to solve the dilemma of a sagging effective demand produced by wage repressions and technologically induced unemployment for the mass of the workers.

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See the debate in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and Craig Calhoun, Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. 3. André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, London, Verso, 1989, p. 22. 4. Ibid., p. 86. 5. Ibid., pp. 87–8. 6. Ibid., p. 100. 7. Ibid., p. 114. 8. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, Oxford University Press, 2009 edition. 9. Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, p. 116. 10. Ibid., pp. 45–6. 11. Pope Francis, ‘Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium of the Holy Father Francis to the Bishops, Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithful on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World’, National Catholic Register, 15 December 2013, paragraph 192. 12.

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Frugality is about enjoyment, not penny-pinching ! Happy saving—or should we say happy frugaling . . . ONE SURE WAY TO SAVE MONEY Stop Trying to Impress Other People Other people are probably so busy trying to impress you that they will, at best, not notice your efforts. At worst, they will resent you for one-upping them. When Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899, it didn’t make a big splash. But the term he coined, “conspicuous consumption,” has made it into the heart of our culture. In the foreword to Veblen’s book, social commentator and writer Stuart Chase summarized his thesis this way: People above the line of base subsistence, in this age and all earlier ages, do not use the surplus, which society has given them, primarily for useful purposes.

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With ridership up, L.A.’s Metro raises fares and pushes for new tax revenue,” The Christian Science Monitor, July 18, 2008, http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0718/p01s02-usgn.html. 2 Based on Ernest Callenbach, Living Cheaply with Style, 2nd edition (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing Inc., 2000), page 167. 3 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (NewYork: Modern Library, 1934), p. xiv. 4 “Big Spenders: As a Favored Pastime, Shopping Ranks High with Most Americans,” The Wall Street Journal, July 30, 1987. 5 Lewis H. Lapham, “An American Feast: You Are What You Buy,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 1988. 6 Avery Comarow, “Saving on Surgery by Going Abroad: Medical tourism or medical travel can produce discounts of 80 percent,” U.S.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Like Watson and her librarians, most would have greeted the arrival of a computer-toting efficiency expert with fear and trepidation. Although Tracy imbued the character of Sumner with his trademark gruff-but-likable persona, such experts were generally seen as the harbingers of reorganization, mechanization, and what the economist Thorstein Veblen described as the “degradation of labor.”7 And as Thomas Haigh has suggested, it was no coincidence that Sumner was both an efficiency expert and a computer designer; many of the “systems men” of the early electronic computer era were efficiency experts turned computer consultants. In any case, the specter of computer-driven unemployment looms large over Desk Set, if only as the source of initial conflict between Sumner and Watson.

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Colliers, no. 131 (1953), 58–63. 3. “Office Robots,” Fortune 45 (January 1952), 82–87, 112, 114, 116, 118. 4. Cheryl Knott Malone, “Imagining Information Retrieval in the Library: Desk Set in Historical Context,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no. 3 (2002): 14–22. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: McMillan, 1899). 8. Thomas Haigh, “The Chromium-Plated Tabulator: Institutionalizing an Electronic Revolution, 1954–1958,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 4, no. 23 (2001), 75–104. 9. James W. Cortada, Information Technology as Business History: Issues in the History and Management of Computers (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). 10.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Alien intelligence also suggests the distance of global technology company bureaucrats from the real world consequences of their algorithms. These managers may release a service in a country whose language is unknown not merely to them, but also to anyone several reporting levels down. They follow in the worst tradition of what Thorstein Veblen called “absentee ownership”: distant controllers poorly understanding their business’s context and impact.91 When a massive firm buys a store thousands of miles away from its headquarters, it tends to assess its performance in crude terms, with little interest in the community in which the store is embedded.

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Rachael Revesz, “Steve Bannon’s Data Firm in Talks for Lucrative White House Contracts,” Independent, November 23, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-analytica-steve-bannon-robert-rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-conflicts-of-interest-white-a7435536.html; Josh Feldman, “CIA Concluded Russia Intervened in Election to Help Trump, WaPo Reports,” Mediaite, December 9, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/cia-concluded-russia-intervened-in-election-to-help-trump-wapo-reports/. 90. Will Oremus, “The Prose of the Machines,” Slate, July 14, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/07/automated_insights_to_write_ap_earnings_reports_why_robots_can_t_take_journalists.html. 91. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923); Christopher Meek, Warner Woodworth, and W. Gibb Dyer, Managing by the Numbers: Absentee Ownership and the Decline of American Industry (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1988). 92. The problem is even worse overseas.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Drake Bennett, “Commentary: The Inequality Delusion,” BloombergBusinessweek.com, Oct. 21, 2010; and Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 214–15. 37. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009). 38. Stiglitz, Price of Inequality, 43. 39. Thorstein Veblen, arguably the most original and greatest American economist of all time, was the first to grasp this fundamental change in capitalism, though many, of course, have followed in his wake. See Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964). The book was originally published in 1923 and was Veblen’s final work. 40. An industry is considered concentrated when the four largest companies account for at least 50 percent of its total shipment value.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Just as Berkeley hippies of the 1960s felt proud to be “above consumerism,” to demonstrate their higher ideals of love and world harmony—even though they often depended on the parental money they were “above”—so too Mike Schaff and other Tea Party advocates seemed to be saying, “I’m above the government and all its services” to show the world their higher ideals, even though they used a host of them. For everything else it is, the government also functions as a curious status-marking machine. The less you depend on it, the higher your status. As the sociologist Thorstein Veblen long ago observed, our distance from necessity tends to confer honor. I count all the reasons Mike disdained government. It displaced community. It took away individual freedom. It didn’t protect the citizenry. Its officials didn’t live like nuns. And the federal government was a more powerful, distant, untrustworthy version of the state government.

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Claims of a causal relationship between nearness to industry and illness are usually hard to prove and are not accepted in court. 110but not dangerous for “children six and under” Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Health Consultation: Calcasieu Estuary Sediment Sample Evaluation, Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, EPA Facility ID: LA0002368173 (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2005). 110“Analyses reported as non-detects were analyzed using method detection limits that were higher than the comparison values used as screening tools” Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Health Assessment, Initial/Public Comment Release, Review of Data from the 2010 EPA Mossville Site Investigation (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2013). 110the report was written by one set of state officials for another The protocol was prepared by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, which collaborated with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. 110Discard “juices which contain the fat . . . to further reduce exposure” Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, Protocol for Issuing Public Health Advisories for Chemical Contaminants in Recreationally Caught Fish and Shellfish (Baton Rouge, LA: Office of Public Health, 2012), 24, http://www.dhh.louisiana.gov/assets/oph/Center-EH/envepi/fishadvisory/Documents/LA_Fish_Protocol_FINAL_Feb_2012_updated_links.pdf. 114our distance from necessity tends to confer honor In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen (New York: Macmillan, 1899) noted that honor, as human beings construct and imagine it, is based on their degree of detachment from economic need and usefulness. So thin women were admired the closer they came to starvation, and thus showed they didn’t fear it. In the realm of higher learning, Veblen argued, the more abstruse or useless the topic, the more honorific.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In much of western society, ever since ancient Greece and Rome, polygamy has been illegal or at least widely opposed. But even with those conventions, wealthy men nd it much easier to have a airs outside their marriages or to hire the most sought-after prostitutes. More concretely, the power that the rich obtain is the power to engage in what the economist Thorstein Veblen termed conspicuous consumption, which, when indulged in by men, is instinctively recognized by the general public as a possible ploy to attract the opposite sex—even if the plan is never consummated. Underlying the desire for wealth is a sexual and social-status impulse. This applies as well to women, whose desire for wealth may arise from somewhat different, though equally strong, motives.

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As one eighteenth-century observer sized up these laws, “they are null, because luxury employs itself upon objects which the laws have not foreseen, and could not foresee.”9 The laws’ details were commonly ridiculed, and in modern times they are thought to be inconsistent with individual freedoms. They did, nevertheless, reappear again and again for thousands of years, re ecting the persistence of public disgust with the extravagance of the rich. There is an economic theory that would seem to justify something akin to sumptuary laws or taxes. The theory was described by Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class and the economic part of the theory was expanded by George Akerlof and other economic theorists.10 Many people spend lavishly on consumption that they do not really even enjoy merely to signal to others their status—a practice called positional consumption because its value to the consumer depends on how it establishes his or her position relative to others.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

In earlier eras slavish hours were most closely associated not with elites but with workers in low-paid jobs: clerks, factory workers, and farmhands who had little choice in the matter. The wealthy pitied the “striving classes” and relished and took pride in their leisure. Why break a sweat when you have everything you need and plenty of what you desire? As economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class, “Conspicuous abstention from labor…becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement.” It’s hard to know just when the tables turned—that is, when working long hours became a signal of high status and power. It was almost certainly linked to the post–World War II economic boom and a rising consumerism that inclined workers to swap leisure for extra cash.

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demanding jobs that give us no agency Erik Gonzalez-Mulé and Bethany Cockburn, “Worked to Death: The Relationships of Job Demands and Job Control with Mortality,” Personnel Psychology 70, no. 1 (2017): 73–112, http://dx.doi.org/​doi:10.1111/​peps.12206. “their superiors approved highly” William Hollingsworth Whyte, “How Hard Do Executives Work?,” Fortune, January 1954. “Conspicuous abstention from labor” Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), 43. “he cannot distinguish between work and the rest of his life” William Hollingsworth Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). in the case of white-collar workers David R.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Andrew Lo, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, is in the vanguard of an effort to re-conceptualize markets as adaptive systems.19 A long-run historical analysis of the development of financial services also suggests that evolutionary forces are present in the financial world as much as they are in the natural world.20 The notion that Darwinian processes may be at work in the economy is not new, of course. Evolutionary economics is in fact a well-established sub-discipline, which has had its own dedicated journal for the past sixteen years.21 Thorstein Veblen first posed the question ‘Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?’ (implying that it really should be) as long ago as 1898.22 In a famous passage in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which could equally well apply to finance, Joseph Schumpeter characterized industrial capitalism as ‘an evolutionary process’: This evolutionary character . . . is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers.

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See also John Authers, ‘Quants Adapting to a Darwinian Analysis’, Financial Times, 19 May 2008. 20 The following is partly derived from Niall Ferguson and Oliver Wyman, The Evolution of Financial Services: Making Sense of the Past, Preparing for the Future (London / New York, 2007). 21 The Journal of Evolutionary Economics. Seminal works in the field are A. A. Alchian, ‘Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic Theory’, Journal of Political Economy, 58 (1950), pp. 211-22, and R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, MA, 1982). 22 Thorstein Veblen, ‘Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?’ Quarterly Journal of Economics, 12 (1898), pp. 373-97. 23 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London, 1987 [1943]), pp. 80-4. 24 Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (London, 2005), pp. 180ff. 25 Jonathan Guthrie, ‘How the Old Corporate Tortoise Wins the Race’, Financial Times, 15 February 2007. 26 Leslie Hannah, ‘Marshall’s “Trees” and the Global “Forest”: Were “Giant Redwoods” Different?’

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

To fully appreciate the versatility of capital, we have to move beyond simple classifications and understand how capital obtains the qualities that distinguish it from other assets. Economists in the “old” institutionalist tradition have come close, but their contributions have largely been forgotten.41 Thorstein Veblen, for example, suggested that capital is an asset’s “income-yielding capacity.”42 And in his seminal book The Legal Foundations of Capitalism, John Commons defined capital as “the present value of expected beneficial behavior of other people.”43 In his account, law takes center stage in enhancing the reliability of others’ expected behavior.

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Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Hodgson has kept much of their work alive. For an excellent summary of their contribution to the concept of capital, see chap. 7 of his book Conceptualizing Capitalism. 42. Thorstein Veblen, “On the Nature of Capital,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 22, no. 4 (1908):517–542. 238 n ote s to c h a P te r 1 43. John R. Commons, The Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: MacMillan, 1924), p. 28. 44. Commons based this analysis on the famous slaughterhouse cases. See ibid., pp. 13 and 21, where he argues that the “substance” of capitalism is “production for the use of others and acquisition for the use of self, such that the meaning of property and liberty spreads out from the expected uses of production and consumption to the expected transactions on the markets.” 45.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Samuelsonian thought describes modern economists of the so-called mainstream—modeling exclusively with “constrained maximization,” in which the only virtue acknowledged is prudence.9 Not every worthy economist is Samuelsonian. An embattled countersquad of economic thinkers, with quite varied politics, has in the twentieth century included Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, John Maynard Keynes, John H. Clapham, Frank Knight, Eli Heckscher, Gunnar Myrdal, Antonio Gramsci, Luigi Einaudi, Joan Robinson, Kenneth Boulding, Ronald Coase, Paul Sweezy, Alexander Gerschenkron, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Shackle, Robert Heilbroner, Theodore Schultz, Albert Hirschman, Bert Hoselitz, Bruno Leoni, Noel Butlin, James Buchanan, Thomas Schelling, Robert Fogel, Amartya Sen, Elinor Ostrom, Israel Kirzner, and Vernon Smith.

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Thus Gurcharan Das shows that the eldest of the Kauruvas in the Mahabharata, Duryodhana, is a slave to the vice of envy about his cousin Yudhishthira. The envy could be represented easily in individualistic, Max U form as “Duryodhana’s utility is a function of the worldly consumption of Duryodhana minus that of Yudhishthira.”11 Some economists, from Thorstein Veblen through Fred Hirsch (1977) down to Robert Frank (2005), have argued that “positional goods” are prevalent, making for an arms race in consumption that we must suppress by government action. But it seems dubious that social position bulks so large as a motive for consumption as to justify such use of violence-backed regulation.

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And it was for the good of poor people that they should, because otherwise the surviving “betterments” are boondoggles for well-connected chaps, or monuments for the already rich. They are Baconian research projects of doubtful worth, destructive creation rather than creative destruction. That is what is wrong with Thorstein Veblen’s notion that engineers, not the price system, should rule. Engineers are full of bad ideas too, such as high-speed trains constructed at great expense on little-used lines—unless central-planning rationalism is indeed the ticket, which outside of wartime it usually is not. Trade-tested cooperation, competition, and conservation in the right mix is the ticket for rapid economic evolution * The economic and historical question, confronted here and in Bourgeois Dignity, is Why in Britain and why then?

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase summed up this particular conception of culture, which many progressives (unlike Arnold, who thought the "best" could be appreciated only by the few) now proposed to universalize in the expectation that this would not require any appreciable alteration of its content. The second position, advanced by Thorstein Veblen, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, among others, rested on a very different idea of both culture and democracy. These writers distrusted the missionary impulse they detected in the progressives' program of cultural uplift. Instead of popularizing leisure-class values, they advocated a new set of values based on the dignity of labor.

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Three distinct traditions contributed to right-wing theorizing, and it was the right's inability to disentangle them, in part, that explained why its version of the new class turned out to be such a "muddled concept," in the words of Daniel Bell. A progressive tradition, which could be traced all the way back to Saint-Simon, considered the technical intelligentsia a class destined to play an increasingly important role in modern society by virtue of its indispensability. In the United States, Thorstein Veblen was probably the most influential exponent of this view. Veblen distinguished between the "pecuniary" culture of the leisure class and the scientific, critical, and "iconoclastic" culture of the engineers. He ridiculed the idea that the workers, reduced to automata by the modern division of labor, knew enough to expropriate and operate the industrial plant, but he had more faith in professional and managerial personnel, who valued efficiency for its own sake and cared more about industrial growth and productivity than about profits.

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William Schneider, "JFK's Children: The Class of '74," Atlantic, March 1989, -567- 35-58, is the source of most of my information about neoliberalism, along with Paul Tsongas's uninspiring book, The Road from Here (1981), which was intended to serve as the movement's manifesto. The idea of the "new class" can be traced, in its progressive version, in the writings of exponents like Walter Lippmann, Preface to Politics (1914) and Drift and Mastery (1914); Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (1921); Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932); George Soule, The ComingAmerican Revolution (1934); John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (1967); and David Bazelon, Power in America: The Politics of the New Class (1967).

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Consumerism is an addiction too. Psychology offers insights into the rat race and consumerism. The experimental evidence is that most people care more about status and therefore their relative income than they do about the absolute level of income. The “conspicuous consumption” first named by Thorstein Veblen is a kind of arms race of status, and one that the excesses of corporate pay have let rip in the past quarter century. What’s more, the satisfaction we get from extra income and purchases wears off quickly, leaving us, like Edmund in the story, hungry for another fix. The evocative technical term for this is the hedonic treadmill.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

It was a cluster of two-room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of Arthur Rackham and Honey Bear. Not only that, it had true cultural cachet. Thorstein Veblen had lived there. So had two Nobel Prize winners everybody knew about though the names escaped them. The cottages rented for just $60 a month. Getting into Perry Lane was like getting into a club. Everybody who lived there had known somebody else who lived there, or they would never have gotten in, and naturally they got to know each other very closely too, and there was always something of an atmosphere of communal living.

…

A developer bought most of Perry Lane and was going to tear down the cottages and put up modern houses and the bulldozers were coming. The papers turned up to write about the last night on Perry Lane, noble old Perry Lane, and had the old cliché at the ready, End of an Era, expecting to find some deep-thinking latter-day Thorstein Veblen intellectuals on hand with sonorous bitter statements about this machine civilization devouring its own past. Instead, there were some kind of nuts out here. They were up in a tree lying on a mattress, all high as coons, and they kept offering everybody, all the reporters and photographers, some kind of venison chili, but there was something about the whole setup— and when it came time for the sentimental bitter statement, well, instead, this big guy Kesey dragged a piano out of his house and they all set about axing the hell out of it and burning it up, calling it "the oldest living thing on Perry Lane," only they were giggling and yahooing about it, high as coons, in some weird way, all of them, hard-grabbing off the stars, and it was hard as hell to make the End of an Era story come out right in the papers, with nothing but this kind of freaking Olsen & Johnson material to work with, but they managed to go back with the story they came with, End of an Era, the cliché intact, if they could only blot out the cries in their ears of Ve-ni-son Chi-li— —and none of them would have understood it, anyway, even if someone had told them what was happening.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Women,” he muses, looking up at the crystal chandelier, stroking his beard and frowning, appearing stumped by the question. Historically, he begins, women’s leisure—the ladies who lunch—was purely a reflection of the status of the men around them. “Women,” he says finally, “have always rather been in the laboring class.” Gershuny points me to the seminal work on leisure by Thorstein Veblen, who, in 1899, wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. When I later got around to reading it, there it is, bam, right on page 2: “Manual labour, industry, whatever has to do directly with the everyday work of getting a livelihood, is the exclusive occupation of the inferior class,” Veblen wrote.

…

But there’s a reason why play is hard for women. Nadia and Sara are not just taking on America’s worship of work, productivity, achievement, speed, and busyness. The two women are pushing against the freight of human history that can be boiled down into three powerful words: Women. Don’t. Play. Remember Thorstein Veblen’s influential Theory of the Leisure Class? He dispensed with women on page 2, who, as part of the “inferior” class since at least barbarian times, were supposed to do the drudge work of society. Think of the Bible and the “good” wife of Proverbs 31: “She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household … Her lamp does not go out … She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness.”

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Should we confront a liar? We also try to signal our intentions and our capabilities. Dressing up for an interview signals being eager for the job; education and diplomas, we hope, signal our capabilities to potential employers.17 Signals are also not limited to aggressive situations. The sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s theory of “conspicuous consumption”—the idea that we buy expensive items just to show them off, not to use them—is a form of signaling theory.18 In class, I sometimes ask my college students whether, instead of expensive diamond engagement rings, they would be satisfied with chemically identical lab diamonds that possess every quality of diamonds (they are not fake diamonds, just ones created in labs that might have fewer flaws than mined ones), or whether they would consider keeping the money as a couple to use as a down payment for their first house.

…

Huttegger, “Between Cheap and Costly Signals: The Evolution of Partially Honest Communication,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 280, no. 1750 (2012). 17. Judith Donath, “Signaling Identity,” 2007, http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/SignalsTruthDesign/SignalingAbstracts.1.pdf. 18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1994). 19. Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013); Judith Donath, The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014); and Judith Donath, “Signals in Social Supernets,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (2007): 231−51. 20.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

In identifying the man who misses what matters in life by questing after ‘trinkets of frivolous utility’, Smith shows his awareness that markets can be driven by human passions as well as by human calculation. Today we might describe some such items as ‘Veblen goods’. Named after the great Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen, Veblen goods are those of ‘conspicuous consumption’, for which demand does not lessen when the price rises, as the standard theory would predict. Instead, demand for the good increases, as consumers see the price rise as a signal of relative scarcity or status, making the good still more desirable.

…

I am very grateful to Tim Besley for this point; see especially his ‘The New Political Economy’, Economic Journal, 117.524, 2007. See also Roman Frydman and Michael D. Goldberg, Imperfect Knowledge Economics, Princeton University Press 2007 Wisdom of crowds: cf. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Doubleday Books 2004 Veblen goods: see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Macmillan 1899. In his essay on the imitative arts (in EPS) Smith memorably analyses the phenomenon of topiary in Veblenian terms: ‘It was some years ago the fashion to ornament a garden with yew and holly trees, clipped into the artificial shapes of pyramids, and columns, and vases, and obelisks.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

According to one journalist’s account of power lunches in New York’s finest restaurants, “[Prices] can act as a kind of velvet rope to keep out tourists and people paying their own way, allowing a big hitter to tuck in a napkin secure in the belief that no one who works for him can afford to walk in the door.”81 Price-tag framing provides “outsiders” with information about what luxury items cost, but it also establishes the notion that people in other classes are categorically excluded from many elite settings by their inability or unwillingness to pay such prices. Journalists employing price-tag framing in their stories typically use the concept of conspicuous consumption,82 formulated by economist Thorstein Veblen (who wrote at the turn of the twentieth century), to describe the excessive and extravagant purchases of the wealthy. According to Veblen, conspicuous consumption is one of many signs of the superfluous lifestyle of the rich. Although some contemporary media reports condemn them, others glorify the excessive spending and “gracious lifestyles” of the wealthy in order to gain media audiences and advertising revenue.

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Power Lunch Menu,” The Huffington Post, November 30, 2009, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/30/ no-recession-special-on-t_n_373681.html (accessed June 27, 2010). 80. Jared Paventi, “Expensive New York Restaurants,” GolfLink, http://www .golflink.com/list_28775_expensive-new-york-restaurants.html (accessed June 27, 2010). 81. David Carr, “The Powering Up of the Power Lunch,” New York Times, December 10, 2003, D4. 82. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, intro. Robert Lekachman (New York: Penguin, 1994 [1899]). 83. Jan Parr and Ted Shen, “The Richest Chicagoans: Who’s Up, Who’s Down?” Chicago (February 2002): 49. 84. “Most Expensive Gated Communities in America,” Forbes.com, 2006, http:// www.forbes.com/maserati/cx_bs_1114home.html (accessed June 10, 2010). 85.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

business cycle, California gold rush, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, double entry bookkeeping, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, God and Mammon, Gregor Mendel, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, New Journalism, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, plutocrats, price discrimination, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, yellow journalism

As John Jr. remembered, “Our interests centered in the house; our friends came there almost wholly. We went rarely, practically none at all, to neighbors’ houses.”14 John Jr. hinted that the children brought to visit weren’t real companions and were mostly window dressing to gratify his parents. “We had no childhood friends, no school friends.”15 It was a far cry from Thorstein Veblen’s image of the spoiled leisure class. Convinced that struggle was the crucible of character, Rockefeller faced a delicate task in raising his children. He wanted to accumulate wealth while inculcating in them the values of his threadbare boyhood. The first step in saving them from extravagance was keeping them ignorant of their father’s affluence.

…

This nationwide talent search netted nine college presidents for the first faculty. Harper signed up John Dewey and George Herbert Mead for the philosophy department and enticed novelist Robert Herrick to join the English department, while Albion Small initiated America’s first graduate department in sociology. Another eminent recruit, economist Thorstein Veblen, came to regard Harper as the educational counterpart of capitalists such as Rockefeller and satirized him as a captain of erudition, one of a new species of empire builders in higher education. However inspired he was by Harper, Rockefeller felt sorely beset by his extravagant spending, and their relations began to fray.

…

William chided his brother for sponsoring the school: “You are getting together a lot of scribblers, a crowd of Socialists who won’t do any good.” 83 Rockefeller wrestled with the issue but believed, on balance, that “while scribblers of the worthless kind brought poison with their ink to the minds of the people, yet multitudes of others come out of these institutions of learning to strengthen the good among us. Let us so hope.”84 The University of Chicago was scarcely immune to the radical currents on campus. In 1899, while at Chicago, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class, which portrayed the new captains of industry as brutal troglodytes and exposed the primitive impulses lurking behind their gaudy consumption habits. The best-publicized controversy about Rockefeller’s role at Chicago involved the dismissal in 1895 of a young political economist, Edward Bemis, who advocated municipal gas ownership and attacked the Standard Oil–controlled United Gas Improvement Company.

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

The anonymity of the global economy goes hand in hand with a certain spectral quality – a sense that the agents behind every transaction are not creatures of flesh and blood who live in communities but discarnate corporations, who take no real responsibility for producing what they sell but who merely stick their brand on it, so claiming a rent on producer and consumer alike. It is difficult to articulate this complaint, though it has been made, with varying degrees of sarcasm, by a century of writers from Thorstein Veblen to Naomi Klein – the argument advancing step by step in order to accommodate the latest move towards anonymity. This economy is not dislocated, as the nineteenth-century socialists imagined, but unlocated. Yet it is for this very reason that it troubles us. Economic activity has become detached from the building of communities.

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, public intellectual, Simon Kuznets, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Nor, especially in the USA, should we underestimate the importance of a mass of immigrants from Germany, tsarist Russia and elsewhere, who often brought Marxist-influenced ideologies with them to the new world as part of their intellectual baggage.11 And nor should we underestimate the movement of resistance to ‘big business’ during this period of acute social tension and ferment in the USA, which made a number of radical thinkers receptive to, or at least interested in socialist critiques of capitalism. One thinks not only of Thorstein Veblen but of progressive, centrally placed economists like Richard Ely (1854–1943) who ‘probably exerted a greater influence upon American economics during its vital formative period than any other individual’.12 For these reasons the USA, though developing little independent Marxist 220 The Influence of Marxism 1880–1914 thinking itself, became, rather surprisingly, a significant centre for the diffusion of Marxist writings and influence.

…

Some Marxist influence, or stimulus, may perhaps be detected in the ‘institutional’ school or current of American economics then popular in the USA where, as already mentioned, the strong sympathy of many economists for ‘progressivism’ and social reform inclined them to look favourably on economic theories critical of big business (R.T. Ely, the Wisconsin school; above all Thorstein Veblen). Economics as a discipline separate from the rest of the social sciences hardly existed in Germany, where the influence of the ‘historical school’ and the concept of the Staatswissenschaften (best translated as ‘policy sciences’) was dominant. The impact of Marxism, i.e. of the massive fact of German social democracy, on economics cannot be treated in isolation.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Theodor W. adorno, “veblen’s attack on Culture,” in Prisms (Cambridge, Ma: MiT press, 1983), 75–76 (originally published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 3 [1941]: 389–413). John Cunningham Wood offers a slightly different translation of adorno’s phrase, calling it “indirect utility” instead of “mediated utility” in Thorstein Veblen: Critical Assessments (london: routledge, 1993), 4. Chambers raises a similar point about the cachet of (sub)cultural practices in “Symbolic Equipment and the Objects of leisure images.” For example, see Michael Martin and Gabe Morford, Mash SF (Mash Transit productions, 2007); David rowe, Fast Friday (infinite Quest productions, 2008).

…

Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport. 1st English ed. london: pluto press, 1996. Wollen, peter, and Joe Kerr, eds. Autopia: Cars and Culture. london: reaktion Books, 2002. “Women in the automotive industry.” Catalyst (March 2009). available at http://www. catalyst.org/publication/235/women-in-the-automotive-industry. Wood, John Cunningham. Thorstein Veblen: Critical Assessments. london: routledge, 1993. Work, George, and laurence Malone. “Bicycles, Development, and the Third World.” Environment 25, no. 1 (1983): 41. World Bank. “China Transport Sector Study.” Washington, DC, 1985. ———. “a Decade of action in Transport: an Evaluation of World Bank assistance to the Transport Sector, 1995–2005.”

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

So these days the 400 are spending a much smaller percentage of their wealth living extremely well than a quarter of a century ago. * * * As Ira Rennert’s villa by the sea signals, the past two decades have been an era of extravagant spending by certain members of America’s superrich, a period that mimics earlier epochs of flamboyant wealth in American history. The economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase conspicuous consumption to describe this type of spending. As he wrote in his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, “To gain and to hold the esteem11 of men it is not sufficient merely to hold wealth and power. The wealth and power must be put into evidence.” Then, as now, houses were one common extravagance.

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In 1998 Rennert tried: Munk, “Greenwich’s Outrageous Fortunes.” 9. Neighbors have called the house “arrogant”: Julia C. Mead, “At Home in Versailles on the Atlantic,” New York Times, July 4, 2004. 10. The writer Kurt Vonnegut: Ibid. Vonnegut stayed put. He died on April 11, 2007. 11. “To gain and to hold the esteem”: Thorstein Veblen, quoted in James W. Michaels, “The Mass-Market Rich,” Forbes, Oct. 9, 2000. 12. In Veblen’s day: See Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt (New York: William Morrow, 1989), for more details on the period. 13. In 2007 timber baron Tim Blixseth: Forbes.com. 14.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss

call centre, death from overwork, delayed gratification, experimental subject, full employment, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mega-rich, Naomi Klein, Own Your Own Home, post-materialism, post-work, purchasing power parity, retail therapy, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, wage slave, work culture

Luxury fever Popular folklore has always held a fascination with the profligate lifestyles of the monied classes. Sociologists have analysed how extravagance serves as a device whereby the rich differentiate themselves from the mass of the population. One of the earliest commentators on this was Thorstein Veblen, who coined the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class. For their part, the masses watch the behaviour of the rich with a mixture of awe, envy and scorn. This attraction is the reason for the continuing popularity of magazines, newspapers and, more recently, television shows that expose the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society by Charles Handy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, bonus culture, British Empire, call centre, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, falling living standards, future of work, G4S, greed is good, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, late capitalism, mass immigration, megacity, mittelstand, Occupy movement, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, Veblen good, Walter Mischel

I am ashamed now to think that I had no idea of how I was going to earn that money or how I wanted to live, other than driving around in an absurd car, but I was no different from some of the young people I come across today – money as the presumed answer to life. The trouble is that money remains the one thing of which, it seems, you can never have enough, as the escalating (and surely unnecessary) rewards of senior executives seem to prove. Even when you have met all your needs and wants there are always the Veblen goods, so called after Thorstein Veblen’s theory of comparative goods, those aspects of conspicuous expenditure that are effectively rationed, like the membership of elite clubs, the ownership of property in an exclusive zone, or being in the top ten of some league table of corporate pay. Money is also, for some, a scorecard, unrelated to anything it can buy except a place on the Forbes List of billionaires.

Interventions by Noam Chomsky

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Monroe Doctrine, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, old-boy network, Ralph Nader, Thorstein Veblen, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, éminence grise

A further reason is that Social Security is of little value for the rich though it is crucial for survival for working people, the poor, their dependents, and the disabled. And as a government program, it has such low administrative costs that it offers nothing to financial institutions. It benefits only the “underlying population,” not the “substantial citizens,” to borrow Thorstein Veblen’s acid terminology. The medical system, however, works very well for the people who matter. Health care is effectively rationed by wealth, and enormous profits flow to private power thanks to management practices geared to profit, not health care. The underlying population can be treated with lectures on responsibility.

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

hiring and firing, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, means of production, meritocracy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

Furthermore, the political perspective would add, as an ideal, it is occasionally simpleminded, at times unfair and always subject to change. No aspect of this peculiar modern ideal has come under greater scrutiny than the associations it constructs between, on the one hand, wealth and virtue and, on the other, poverty and moral dubiousness. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen considered the emergence of financial worth, in the early nineteenth century, as the central and often sole criterion employed in commercial societies’evaluation of their members:“[Wealth has become] the conventional basis of esteem. Its possession has become necessary in order to have any reputable standing in the community.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It was their jobs that lured people from all over the world to America’s big cities; their abuses that hastened the development of labor unions and antitrust law; their indifference to the environment that meant that sunlight could hardly penetrate the smoky air of Pittsburgh and Chicago; and their capacity to produce wealth that posed questions about inequality and meritocracy. The robber barons excited awe and disgust in equal measure for their “conspicuous consumption” (a term that Thorstein Veblen first coined to describe their spending habits), in the form of mansions, parties, and art collections. Even the parsimonious Andrew Carnegie, whose writings included The Advantage of Poverty, owned a Scottish castle, Skibo, with a staff of eighty-two and a New York mansion with sixty-four rooms.5 FIRST CAME THE RAILROADS Why did these extraordinary organizations take off when they did?

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Before the mathematization of economics in the mid-twentieth century, it was not radical for economists to recognize that people care about the process as well as results.1 By this, the economists didn’t mean some version of what we now call cognitive bias—the manufacturer whom Alfred Marshall described in Chapter 2 as motivated more by the pursuit of victory than increasing his wealth is not making a mistake.2 Thorstein Veblen pointed out that rational choice (or “marginal utility theory,” as he called it) “offers no theory of a movement of any kind, being occupied with the adjustment of values to a given situation … For all their use of the term ‘dynamic,’ neither Mr. [John Bates] Clark nor any of his associates in this line of research have yet contributed anything at all appreciable to a theory of genesis, growth, sequence, change, process, or the like, in economic life.”3 “Genesis, growth, sequence, change, [and] process” are not minor matters; they are fundamental to our experience.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

At the same time, their sense of themselves as a special people with a unique relationship with God – a sense that has been massively reinforced by millennia of persecution – has given them the self-confidence, first, to keep themselves to themselves, producing a powerful collective identity, and second, to succeed in their various callings. The two sides of Jewish identity have driven them to make intellectual breakthroughs. Thorstein Veblen argued that the archetypal Jewish intellectual ‘becomes a disturber of the intellectual peace, but only at the cost of becoming an intellectual wayfaring man, a wanderer in the intellectual no-man’s-land, seeking another place to rest, further along the road, somewhere over the horizon’.6 The argument of this chapter is that the Jewish people played a prominent role in developing the meritocratic idea.

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THE CHOSEN PEOPLE 1 George Gilder, The Israel Test (New York, Richard Vigilante Books, 2009), p. 33 2 David Brooks, ‘The Tel Aviv Cluster’, The New York Times, 12 January 2010 3 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 225 4 Ibid., p. 52 5 Ibid., p. 53 6 Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe’, Political Science Quarterly 34 (1) (March 1919), p. 39 7 Hans Eysenck, Know Your Own IQ (London, Penguin, 1962) and Check Your Own IQ (London, Penguin, 1966); Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1987) 8 Slezkine, The Jewish Century, p. 1 9 Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London, Weidenfeld Nicolson, 1987), p. 287 10 Ibid., p. 190 11 Norman Lebrecht, Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World 1847–1947 (London, Oneworld, 2019), p. 186 12 Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (London, T.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

We’re even willing to trade in precious purchasing power for more free time.49 It is worth noting, however, that the line between work and leisure has blurred in recent times. Work is now often perceived as a kind of hobby, or even as the very crux of our identity. In his classic book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the sociologist Thorstein Veblen still described leisure as the badge of the elite. But things that used to be categorized as leisure (art, sports, science, care, philanthropy) are now classed as work. Clearly, our modern Land of Plenty still features plenty of badly paid, crummy jobs. And the jobs that do pay well are often viewed as not being particularly useful.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The Aggs, Oggs, and Acks: Dagny Taggart, Judge Narragansett, Owen Kellogg, Hugh Akston. 3. The Hard Aitches: Richard Halley, Lawrence Hammond, Dr. Hendricks. * At one point in the novel, Rand has John Galt, the leader of the strike, assert that capitalists “have never been on strike in human history.” But as the economist Thorstein Veblen pointed out in 1921, sabotage and malingering are in fact precisely how capitalism works in most industries. Were manufacturing plants simply to run all the time at full blast, for example, prices could not be maintained at profitable levels; overproduction would soon put the manufacturer in question out of business.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

To split the difference, they proposed a form of technocracy—engineers and assorted technicians would rule with beneficent disinterestedness. Engineers would strip the old order of its power, while governing in the spirit of science. They would impose rationality and order. This dream has captivated intellectuals ever since, especially Americans. The great sociologist Thorstein Veblen was obsessed with installing engineers in power and, in 1921, wrote a book making his case. His vision briefly became a reality. In the aftermath of World War I, American elites were aghast at all the irrational impulses unleashed by that conflict—the xenophobia, the racism, the urge to lynch and riot.

Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon

AltaVista, Atul Gawande, business cycle, commoditize, creative destruction, hedonic treadmill, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, young professional

Hotels al ow guests to watch cable television for free, but retain the bizarrely archaic practice of charging a fee for local phone cal s. The soap in the bathroom is there for the taking, but the soda in the minibar is not. I’m not saying that this should be any other way; I’m merely saying that it is odd that it is precisely this way, with so little competitive deviation, down to this level of granularity. Thorstein Veblen was a turn-of-the-century economist whose legacy included the origination of the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” In his most wel -known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, he contended that modern consumption was becoming an empty exercise in which al anyone ever cared about anymore was keeping up with the Joneses.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

These robber barons of the Gilded Age conveyed a public image of heft—befitting their chosen sectors—as well as grumpiness. (J. P. Morgan would assault anyone who dared try to take his photo on account of suffering from the skin disease rosacea; and he claimed that he “owed the public nothing.”) The nineteenth-century economist Thorstein Veblen wrote that these businessmen were akin to barbarians who gained their riches by raping and pillaging rather than by producing it themselves. When it came time for them to leave their mark, their philanthropy became associated with colossal buildings such as Rockefeller Center, the New York Public Library, and Carnegie Hall.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

Hunting is a joy for these tribes-people (Donkin 2010). Somewhere in our past, the definition of work was transformed from something to accomplish an aim into a more modern definition of something we would rather not be doing. How did that happen when the past two centuries have been awash with labour-saving technologies? Thorstein Veblen’s idea of the leisure society was trampled somewhere under the theories of Smith, Marx and Keynes. Work is the protein, interacting with other resources, feeding our seemingly insatiable growth economies that, to our peril, ignore the wellbeing of both the planet and other species. As internet technologies transform our working patterns through self-­ organised platforms, often collectively described as Uberisation and the gig economy, there seems to be a yearning for greater understanding of our past, a need for clues that may lead us in to a sustainable future.

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own by Garett Jones

behavioural economics, centre right, classic study, clean water, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, hive mind, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, law of one price, meta-analysis, prediction markets, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, social intelligence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

A lot of this goes on subconsciously, to be sure: most people probably swear a little more around their high school friends than around their grandmothers, even if they’re not consciously trying to conform. In economics, the view that people’s consumer spending habits are driven by social comparisons is often known as the Veblen Effect after the clever satirist, sociologist, and economist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen focused in particular on conspicuous consumption, on buying things that your neighbors can see, and buying items—or perhaps vacations to exotic locales—that demonstrate your social status. Cornell economist Robert Frank and Harvard economist Juliet Schor are modern proponents of the view that consumer spending is socially driven.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The extreme manifestation of this nostalgic nihilism is Arron Banks, who is the decaying face of Harry Enfield’s Thatcherite ‘loadsamoney’ character, now living off the proceeds of his previous investments, while continuing to troll people about how little he cares about society. The financial troll uses his money to smash things up, as a type of conspicuous consumption: a way, as Thorstein Veblen argued, of showing how much money you can afford to waste, and how insulated you are from the consequences of your actions.7 For men such as Tim Martin, boss of Wetherspoons, backing ‘no deal’ is a way of signalling that you’re rich enough to take a haircut of a few million off your assets. What of the remaining 70 per cent of the population, who are firmly opposed to an ultra-hard or ‘no-deal’ Brexit?

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Through this guilty pleasure, people of modest means are ushered into the vicarious experience of what it feels like to be extravagantly rich in an era of decline. For a brief moment, the working class can empathize with the imperious creditor, even though they lack the assets to maintain the charade. In a sense, one might approach this phenomenon as an elaboration of Thorstein Veblen’s basic insight in his Theory of the Leisure Class: “An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect to worth.”68 The theater of cruelty becomes an emporium of conspicuous consumption. But beyond a little virtual reality, the normalization of everyday sadism fulfills deeper functions as well.

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Latter-day followers of Galbraith bring various counterexamples to the table, such as the recent policy to suppress cigarette advertising in the United States, but to no avail.86 Curiously enough, given that it bulks so large in everyday life, the average person still ardently believes that all that expenditure and all that effort to manage their desires is essentially impotent, and by implication, wasted. Neoliberals, as one might expect, have come to concoct a much more plausible justification of the phenomenon. They have carefully read and absorbed their leftist critics, from Thorstein Veblen to Naomi Klein, and far from rejecting them outright, they openly use their ideas to render the process of persuasion both more unconscious and more effective.87 Neoliberals have pioneered the signal innovation of importing the double-truth character of their project into the everyday lives of the common man.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

ECHOES While an upper class has been in existence in New York City for more than three centuries, it is the Gilded Age upper class that has captivated the scholarly community and the general public alike. For many people, the Gilded Age upper class is the upper class. One sign of this enduring interest are the landmark studies that have been made of it, starting with Thorstein Veblen’s famous The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In portraying earlier leisure classes as arising from “barbarism” and in criticizing their “predatory habits,” Veblen gave voice to the awe and revulsion with which he and many of his contemporaries reacted to the lavish expenditures and economic muscle of the nouveaux riches of their day.108 The Theory of the Leisure Class is a sweeping work that begins in the feudal period and investigates the development of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure on a national and even a global scale, but there was significant overlap between his American leisure class and the New York City upper class of this period.

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Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1–10. 106. Di Cesnola to Dodge, October 17, 1892, MMA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twenty-Second Annual Report, 500–02; and New York Times, December 12, 1882 and June 8, 1895. 107. “Report Re Consequences of Sunday opening,” MMA. 108. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899; repr., New York: New American Library, 1953), 21, 28. 109. Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (Chicago: Kerr, 1909; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1936), 696–712; and Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934; repr., New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 3–31. 110.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

In America they were energized by the Calvinist notion that hard work repre- sented the holy life. . . . Traditional American ideology was thus fused with religion. It constituted a single, integrated, and synthetic body of belief. ,,3 The explicit linkage between the natural rights of ownership and divine grace had faded. Property rights began to develop their own independent validity. Thorstein Veblen described this shift in his dis- cussion of nineteenth-century business principles. In an analysis of the natural rights doctrine, he concludes that its "central tenet, that own- ership is a natural right resting on the productive work and the discre- tionary choice of the owner, gradually rises superior to criticism and gathers axiomatic certitude.

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Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 172. 2. John Child, British Management Thought (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969),33. 446 Notes 3. George Cabot Lodge, The New American Ideology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975),116. 4. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Charles Scrib- ner's Sons, 1923),73. 5. As Reinhard Bendix put it: liThe doctrine of self-help proclaimed that em- ployers and workers were alike in self-dependence, and that regardless of class each man's success was a proof of himself and a contribution to the common wealth. . . .

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus