Paper on Thorstein Veblen
Linqin Mei
Ap Economics
Thorstein Bunde Veblen, an American economist, sociologist and social critic, was born on July 30th, 1857 in Cato, Wisconsin. Since Veblen grew up in a Norwegian immigrant farming community in Wisconsin, Norwegian is his first language and the only language he spoke at home, and Veblen learned English as his second language. When he is seventeen years old, he was sent to Carleton College and studied economics under John Bates Clark. After Veblen graduated from Carleton College, he went to Johns Hopkins University and did his graduate work under Charles Sanders Peirce and Yale University under William Graham Sumner Veblen is an odd man, from both his appearance and thought. By looking his photos, he looks very different with those very gentle and charismatic people like Friedrich …show more content…
This term refers to those wealthy upper class people by wasting and throwing away the items that is necessary and useful to show off. Rich people always buy those expansive things to show their status. This phenomenon has been ignored by a lot of economists. When his book first came out, people were surprised. In the book, he talked about the leisure class, which refers to people who does not work, but get money and has a higher status than those hard workers. After criticizing the leisure class, he started to talk about the system problem. Veblen thinks system is actually people’s mind, when the surrounding environment changes, the system would change, too. One of Veblen’s student has said that Veblen brought this world some very confusing changes. He like a visitor from another world, and he sees our world differently. After reading the book and all the research I did, I think Veblen is a very mysterious man, no one knows what his real thoughts are. He sees this world like he is a