Word: veblen
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...plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient, and shrank from the resulting hostility of workmen. Veblen, a lifelong student of the conflict between production and finance...
Sixth child of a family of twelve, Thorstein Veblen was born on a Wisconsin farm to parents who had migrated from Norway. Brought up in a clannish Norwegian community, Veblen spoke no English until he went to Carleton College at Northfield, Minn. There he quickly picked up proficiency in English, became so nice in his choice of words that he finally decided there were no synonyms in the language. After graduating high from Carleton, Veblen taught for a year in a Norwegian-community school, then went East to study philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Yale, take...
...Veblen was neither a clubbable nor an attractive man (he never called any of his friends by their first names), but in spite of his poverty, his rawboned, stoop-shouldered, ungainly appearance, women liked him. He was twice married, twice had to resign a teaching post because of scandalous rumors. On the second occasion, when friends warned him of impending trouble, Veblen fatalistically replied: "What is one to do if the woman moves in on you?" This philosophic detachment was typical of him. He was accustomed to giving all his students the same low grade, never checked their attendance, seldom...
...Veblen was no prophet of things-as-they-should-be but an analyst of things-as-they-are. He gave no answers, put many a stumping question. No one was ever quite sure just what Veblen himself believed. Biographer Dorfman hazards no opinion, concludes that "the question as to the exact nature of his influence remains still to be answered." A week before his death, in a little shack in Palo Alto, he penciled a typical testament: "It is ... my wish . . . that my ashes be thrown loose into the sea, or into some sizable stream running to the sea; that...
...mathematicians the name Veblen means Oswald Veblen, Thorstein's nephew, at present professor of mathematics at The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton...