How Did Thorstein Bunde Veblen's Impact On Capitalism

In this week’s journal, the task was to examine the work of another sociologist who satirically mocked capitalism named Thorstein Bunde Veblen. He was a Norwegian American born in 1857. As a family that emigrated from Norway, Veblen senior became a notable farmer in Minnesota, Thorstein’s sister was the first female graduate from Minnesota College and his older brother was a professor of physics from Iowa State University; who later fathered America’s leading mathematicians, Dr. Oswald Veblen of Princeton University. Thorstein himself started off at John Hopkins but when he could not obtain much needed scholarship he moved to Yale University where he obtained economic support and became a Ph.D holder in 1884 with specialization in philosophy. His insatiable appetite for knowledge drove him further to study economics at Cornell University. Thorstein got an obscured academic position at the University of Chicago but his writings began to feature in University Journal.
Although Thorstein was not considered to be gifted lecturer by most of his students at University of Chicago yet his first book titled “The Theory of the Leisure Class” brought him modicum recognition: of their works were “The Instincts of Worksmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts” (1914). In 1915, just after the First World War broke out, Veblen

While he respected Marx’s concept of parasitic owners of the means of production which were used to basically exploit workers in order to maintain control over them, nevertheless, he was Marx’s avowed critic. Marx opined that the proletariat will eventually rise against the ruling class, whereas Veblen was convinced that the proletariat would instead seek to be like the ruling class. It was this belief that Thorstein articulated is his theory of conspicuous consumption. Both Thorstein and Marx shared similar ideas that technology is a critical agent of social