Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, born in 1857 in Cato, Wisconsin, to Norwegian immigrant parents. His best known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), introduced the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure to describe how wealthy individuals display social status through wasteful spending and nonproductive use of time, and treated economic behavior as socially determined rather than the product of individually rational choice. He co-founded American institutional economics alongside John R. Commons and Wesley Clair Mitchell and developed the Veblenian dichotomy, a distinction between social institutions and technology that remains influential in economic sociology. He taught at Cornell, the University of Chicago, Stanford, the University of Missouri and the New School for Social Research, and died in Menlo Park, California, in 1929.