American economist, sociologist, and institutionalist whose The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) permanently altered the vocabulary of social analysis. A Norwegian-American from rural Minnesota, Veblen wrote from the outside of respectable academic economics with a deadpan ironic style that made his books bestsellers and his academic career a series of short stays at universities that eventually got tired of him.
His central move was to treat economic behavior anthropologically rather than as the rational optimization of marginal utility. Consumption, he argued, is not merely about satisfying needs but about signaling status. The "leisure class" — the rich who do not have to work — demonstrates its superiority through conspicuous leisure (obviously wasted time) and conspicuous consumption (obviously wasted money). Ordinary people then imitate the class above them, producing a cascade of pecuniary emulation that structures the entire economy. The useful goods that result are almost incidental to the status game that produces them.
Veblen extended this framework to institutions more broadly. His distinction between "business" (pecuniary pursuits driven by pecuniary logic) and "industry" (the actual productive work of engineers, workers, and technicians) became a founding categorization of American institutional economics — a tradition carried forward by J.R. Commons, Wesley Mitchell, and later John Kenneth Galbraith. His late pessimism about the compatibility of business control with technical rationality darkened considerably with the outbreak of the First World War.
He remains the great American economist of satire — the one who made reading about commerce feel like reading about a tribal society, because that, he thought, is what it was.