Thorstein Bunde Veblen

Abstract

First, Veblen&s;s biography is outlined. Then, it is demonstrated that Veblen broached the main issues of modern evolutionary economics. He analyzed entrepreneurship, technical change and the importance of the upcoming technostructure, speculative finance, the coordination of human actions in groups, and the change of needs and wants based on specific “instincts”, especially in his “The theory of the leisure class”. In this classical contribution, he castigated prestige and emulation as irrational driving forces in human development. This is enveloped in a historical stage theory and an epistemology of the development of the human mind. Beyond mere descriptive delineations, Veblen also had an often misunderstood and ignored deconstructivist bent and provoked with counterfactual historical “correlations”: He explained the genesis of private property with the enslavement of women of hostile tribes for conspicuous display and as workhorses since early barbarism and not as the legitimate enclosure of e.g. plowed soil (Locke). In addition, he criticized the structural minimalism of equilibrium economics and methodological individualism. Instead, he analyzed processes like the emergence of absentee owners and adaptive structures and developed the concept of cumulative causation. Veblen&s;s criticism of irrational status consumption, unfair distribution, and the tenacity of outdated institutions and habits of thought, as well as his decentralized-sufficiency ideal with elements of macroeconomic and technological control, live on in drafts of the post-growth economy.