Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen was a Norwegian farmer’s son from Minnesota who could not hold an academic post, moving from Chicago to Stanford to Missouri under suspicion of his views and his marriages, and who wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class of 1899 the study of the rich as an anthropologist studies a tribe, giving the language conspicuous consumption. He founded institutional economics, the study of habits rather than calculations, and wrote on the engineers, the universities and imperial Germany. He died in a cabin in California in 1929, months before the crash he might have enjoyed, and asked that no memorial be raised.