Veblen

A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society's productive men and women.Thorstein Veblen was one of America's most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen's ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider.In the hinterlands of America's Midwest, Veblen's schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described.

The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to