A Veblen good is a product that challenges conventional economic theory. Normally, when the price of something increases, demand tends to drop. But for Veblen goods, the opposite occurs — demand ...

In 1893 financial panic triggered a four-year depression in the United States, then the most severe in the nation’s history. Bank runs, shuttered factories, and plummeting wheat prices put millions ...

T he social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen, best remembered today for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was born in 1857 to a family of Wisconsin farmers who had emigrated from Norway.

THE INNOCENTS AT CEDRO: A MEMOIR OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN AND SOME OTHERS —Robert L Duffus—<Macmillan ($2). Robert L. Duffus, of the New York Times editorial staff, is a highly competent journalist and a ...

THE PORTABLE VEBLEN (632 pp.)—Edited by Max Lerner—Viking ($2). Yesterday’s harried “freethinkers” produced a flood of radical literature, most of which is now as dull and dead as the social ...

"The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure." —Thorstein ...