The economist who coined conspicuous consumption spent seven years jobless on a farm
Thorstein Veblen gave the world the phrase conspicuous consumption in 1899, skewering the rich for spending to be seen spending. The son of Norwegian immigrant farmers, he was an agnostic outsider whom universities repeatedly shut out, and he died nearly broke after his own investments failed.
Veblen was born on 30 July 1857 in Cato, Wisconsin, the sixth of twelve children of parents who had left Valdres in Norway with little money and no English. His father's carpentry skills built them a prosperous farm in Minnesota, and unusually for immigrant families, all the children went on to higher education at nearby Carleton College. Norwegian was his first language, and some commentators argue that growing up in a Norwegian enclave left him permanently at an angle to American life; one historian quipped that leaving Minnesota was, in a sense, emigrating to America.
His parents hoped he would become a Lutheran minister, but at Carleton he studied economics under the young John Bates Clark and read Herbert Spencer, later calling himself agnostic. He went on to Johns Hopkins, where Charles Sanders Peirce taught him, and earned a Yale doctorate in 1884. Then came about seven years without an academic post. Possible reasons include prejudice against Norwegians, his lack of a divinity degree and his open agnosticism; his dissertation, which might have counted against him, has been missing from Yale since 1935. He retreated to the family farm and read voraciously, an experience thought to feed his later attack on profit-driven universities.
Returning to study at Cornell in 1891, he followed his mentor James Laurence Laughlin to the new University of Chicago, where he edited the Journal of Political Economy. The Theory of the Leisure Class appeared in 1899, introducing conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, yet his request for a raise was refused. Students found his teaching dreadful, and at Stanford in 1909 accusations of womanising forced his resignation, although biographers note there is little evidence of affairs. A popular tale that Jane Stanford fired him is doubtful, since she died before he was hired.
His ideas laid the groundwork for institutional economics, and economists still use his contrast between institutions and technology, the Veblenian dichotomy. In old age he lost his savings in raisin vineyards and the stock market and lived modestly in Menlo Park on royalties and a gift from a former student, dying in August 1929 with his stepdaughter Becky beside him.
Source: Thorstein Veblen
