Today is the birthday of one of Wisconsin's best-known intellectuals, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the man who coined the phrase, "conspicuous consumption."

He was born in 1857 to Norwegian immigrants on a farm in Manitowoc County. Neighbors considered him a brilliant but very odd boy who lacked proper respect for his elders. He pestered his teachers with sarcasm and the demeaning but perfect nicknames he assigned them survived for decades.

Young Veblen always got the easiest chores, and then, Tom-Sawyer-like, would persuade other boys to perform them. Ordered to deliver lunch to workers in a far-off field, he enlisted the family dog to carry himself and the food. He wasn't lazy, merely efficient. One field hand said he'd never met anyone who could accomplish so much work with so little movement.

Veblen became a university economics professor. He insisted Adam Smith's "invisible hand" was in fact guided by psychological forces. He argued the economy isn't governed only by scientific laws but also by impulses such as emulation — keeping up with the Joneses — and instinctual urges such as predation.

His most famous book, "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899), examined affluence in Gilded Age America. It pilloried the country's waste of resources on nonproductive activities such as fashion and sports, both of which he considered signs of arrested spiritual development.

Veblen was too visionary and stubborn to fit into academia. He died alone in 1929 in a remote cabin in California, but his critique of modern consumerism is still read today.

— Wisconsin Historical Society
www.wisconsinhistory.org

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