Word: veblen
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...will not argue that the American pie has perhaps been expanding over the last century, but it is yet to be proven that this economic expansion is attributable to, or in spite of the grapplings of the new upwardly mobile business elite. Perhaps Thorstein Veblen had a better understanding of the workings of a capitalist-industrial economy when he detailed the anti-social nature of business. In Veblen's view, business is forced by its basic orientation of profit-seeking into a policy of "sabotage" of production. It must fight against the "inordinate productivity of the machine" by keeping prices...
...close of the century, Economist Thorstein Veblen could already indict those gods for both "conspicuous consumption of valuable goods" and, more significantly, "conspicuous wastefulness." In the Twentieth Century, consumption and waste seemed wedded, the nuptials attended by such as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, whose profligate inventions spurred cheap consumption. Even the Great Depression could not shake the habits of acquisition. F.D.R.'s reference to "the more abundant life" was too enticing to examine. So were the now forgotten promises of the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society...
...Eating Machine Sack artfully enlarges his vision of the System as Superscapegoat for the Superstate. Basically the book consists of profiles of four Viet Nam veterans. But it is also a metaphor that has been duly certified by such thinkers as Marx, Veblen, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Siegfried Giedion (Mechanization Takes Command). The theme is familiar, though no less enticing for having been subject to countless cliches. The oversimplified version goes like this: As technological systems grow more complex, individuals grow less responsible for controlling the consequences...
THORSTEIN VEBLEN in his The Theory of the Leisure Class says that the status of women is the best index of a society's values. Simone de Beauvoir plugs the status of old people into the same thesis. On this basis she condemns all contemporary societies by virtue of the maladjustment...
...INDISPUTABLY difficult to meet people and reach out to them while reading Veblen in a dorm room; how much better to take hammer in hand or pass the crescent wrench...