Conspicuous consumption examples
Conspicuous consumption thorstein veblen...
Veblen, Thorstein
WORKS BY VEBLEN
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929), American sociologist and social critic, was born in Cato, Wisconsin, and brought up on subsistence farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
His parents had migrated to the United States in 1847 from rural Norway; Veblen was the sixth of 12 children.
In that newly settled frontier region the Norwegian immigrants were divided from the Yankee upper class by religious, linguistic, and other cultural barriers.
Conspicuous consumption in economics
The first-generation immigrants held tenaciously to their ancestral peasant ways. Veblen’s father, for example, did not learn English. Even in college, Veblen and his brother Andrew— the first members of the family to attain higher education—were handicapped by lingering difficulties with English, their second language.
Their generation tended to be “marginal”—oriented partly to the Yankee and partly to the Norwegian way of life and skeptical of both. In later years Veblen looked upon thi
