The first was that he wrote the book the Theory of the Leisure class and that the idea of conspicuous consumption is tied to his work. And that’s not bad. If in 100 years the only thing that a reasonably educated person knows about me is a book I wrote and a concept from it, I’d call that a win. We can’t all be Marx, right?
But what really struck me was how contemporary the description of him by the authors and his work excerpted in book actually is. If you’ll forgive me, Veblen is nothing if he is not “Woke”.
That made me wonder why he doesn’t really pop up more. The authors say on one hand one reason that even contemporary socialists don’t cite him more is that he was too pessimistic.
But I think it could be something else. I think it’s a categorization issue. Because the math revolution was taking off, a more subjective narrative-based economics didn’t fit the bill. So he gets shuttled aside to sociology and anthropology programs and the economists don’t look at him.
This could be indicative of a larger problem. Economics sees itself as the queen of the social sciences and thus will look at other fields and try to apply their methods to them, instead of learning what can be useful in analyzing the world from the fields themselves.
Is Veblen’s current marginalization in the halls of deliberate, or just an oversight?
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