Veblen in Twenty-First Century America: The Renewal of a Critique

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), who was according to C. Wright Mills, "the best critic of America that America has produced", is particularly well known for his concepts of "conspicuous consumption", "invidious comparisons" and "trained incapacity". These ideas were first developed in his early classic The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) as part of a devastating critique of consumption patterns during the era of the robber barons at the turn of the twentieth century. Veblen’s assault on the assumptions of conventional economic theory, whose premises he found to be seriously lacking in plausibility, provided much insight into American financial capitalism leading up to the Great Depression in 1929. As inequality in the contemporary United States has increased significantly since the financial collapse in 2008, this article examines the explanations put forward by some current social scientists and compares them to Veblen’s earlier ideas.