Thorstein Velben

Biography

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (30 July 1857 – 3 August 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and the founder of institutional economics. Born in Wisconsin to Norwegian immigrant farmers, he grew up in a Norwegian-speaking community in Minnesota, took his doctorate in philosophy at Yale in 1884, and then failed to find academic work for seven years, returning to the family farm. He eventually taught at the University of Chicago, Stanford, the University of Missouri and the New School for Social Research, leaving several posts under circumstances involving personal scandal and institutional dislike of his manner.

His outsider position is not incidental to the work. Veblen wrote about American society in the tone of an anthropologist describing an unfamiliar tribe, and the resulting estrangement is his central method.

The Theory of the Leisure Class

Published in 1899, and still the most-read work of American social science from its century. Veblen's argument is that in a society where subsistence is assured for a portion of the population, economic behaviour ceases to be about utility and becomes about the demonstration of standing.

• Conspicuous consumption. Goods are acquired and displayed not for their usefulness but as evidence of the ability to acquire them. The wastefulness is the point: an expenditure that produced a return would prove nothing.
• Conspicuous leisure. The demonstrable abstention from productive work as a marker of status — with the corollary that in societies where leisure is not publicly visible, consumption must do the signalling instead.
• Pecuniary emulation. The engine of the whole system. Standards of decency are set by the class immediately above, so the target moves as fast as it is approached, and no level of general enrichment ever produces satisfaction.
• Vicarious consumption. Display performed on a person's behalf by dependents — the spouse's dress, the servant's livery, the child's education — so that status is signalled by proxy.
• Industry versus business. Developed further in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904). Veblen distinguishes the instinct of workmanship, the disposition to make things well and efficiently, from the pecuniary interest of business, which profits from scarcity and disruption. The two are in permanent conflict, and business generally wins.

Selected Works

• The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899)
• The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)
• The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914)
• The Engineers and the Price System (1921)
• Absentee Ownership (1923)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Veblen supplies the economic anthropology behind a great deal of technology consumption. The upgrade cycle is pecuniary emulation with a two-year contract: devices are replaced not when they stop working but when the visible generation moves on, which is the mechanism producing future runoff and, downstream, hand-me-ups.

The theory also transfers directly to non-material display. A visible follower count, a verification badge, a contribution graph, a streak, a device that is recognisably the current model — these are conspicuous consumption in a medium where the good being displayed is attention rather than cloth. And conspicuous leisure has an exact contemporary inversion: in technology culture, conspicuous busyness does the status work that idleness once did, which is a change in the currency rather than in the logic.

Finally, "industry versus business" is the sharpest available framing for the recurring conflict between people who want a system to work well and the commercial interests of the organisation shipping it.

Related Reading

• Future Runoff
• Hand Me Up Technology
• Status
• Charisma
• Robert Goldman
• Roland Marchand