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The latest rewrite was constructed by leading Veblen scholars, including Anne Mayhew and other members of the Association For Evolutionary Economics. It is much more accurate and comprehensive than the previous entry, so it should please Veblen scholars. Please contact me if you have any concerns. User: InstyProf. Date: March 14, 2007 InstyProf 16:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
The following text is visible if you try to edit this article:
Does this mean I can delete these two paragraphs and rewrite this entire entry (with appropriate sources) without someone yelling at me for mass deletion? -- L. 13:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Thorstein Veblen was an interesting guy, but there's not much biographical information on him here. If someone knows about him, it would be nice if she up a section on it.
What on earth is a "valuational principle?" That's only one of the intrusions of jargon here. Frankly, this article needs a fair deal done to make it truly readable.
Contrary to popular belief, the Veblenian dichotomy is not between the technological and ceremonial. It is between business and industry. The former was emphasized by Ayres and has become incorrectly associated with the Veblenian dichotomy. Now, I know most (people who claim to be) followers of Veblen accept the incorrect notion of the veblenian dichotomy, so its probably against wikipedia's customs to go and change it completely. However, it should be mentioned that some hold the opposing view. William M. Dugger, one of those who rightly considers the Veblenian dichotomy to be business/industry has won the Veblen-Commons award, a sure sign that this correct view is becoming more common amongst Veblenites. The talk page indicates this entry is getting rewritten. So I won't change it now, but this should probably be considered by whoever rewrites the article. (Unsigned comment from User:65.35.245.89 03:31, 8 March 2006)
Does Mencken--a guy who satirized everything and never meant what he said--really deserve credit as an important critic of Veblen? Sure, the contribution by User: Idols of Mud is well-written (and provides a source!), but the whole point of the critique appears to be that Veblen (the Minnesota peasant) has less knowledge of a cow's backside than Mencken (the Baltimore burger), a critique so obviously absurd that it becomes amusing--Mencken's intended effect. Actually, this whole article is kind of a train wreck, but this section about Mencken only makes it worse. Anthon.Eff 15:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
InstyProf deleted all of the references in the previous text. I reintroduced them, and added a few more that I was sure of. I also removed a few of his statements. I removed the assertion that Peirce was an important influence on Veblen--unsupported by the biographical sources (check Dorfman), and hard to substantiate by pointing to any specific ideas in Veblen. I also removed some editorializing that didn't seem encyclopedic. Some of InstyProf's statements don't seem correct and I inserted a {{ Fact}} tag to signal that I will remove these if a citation doesn't appear. Otherwise, I think InstyProf is doing good work and am glad that he's here. -- Anthon.Eff 14:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
(1) There is no simple citation to show Peirce's influence on Veblen. So, let's get rid of that. It's widely accepted by many Veblen scholars, but it's probably not crucial. (2) You asked for a citation for the following paragraph: "In 1906, he received an appointment at Stanford University, where he left, it is often written, because of “womanizing.” Though the myth lives on, it seems more likely that rumors that had followed him from the University of Chicago where difficulties with his eccentric first wife had led some to see him, probably wrongly, as a roué, were used to help terminate the employment of a man, equally eccentric, who was widely regarded as a poor teacher and a radical critic." The citation for this argument is the book by Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irven Jorgensen, _Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand_, M.E. Sharpe (April 1999), Chaps. 14 - 18. It might be best to remove the last four words and end the sentence with a period after teacher. Although Jorgensen and Jorgensen imply unhappiness over Veblen's lack of intellectual conformity they much more directly say that it was his eccentric dress and poor teaching that cost him support that might have saved him when his first wife came and mounted her attack. But Jorgensen and Jorgensen do provide powerful evidence that Veblen was not the sexual adventurer that he has been thought. (3) "In this work Veblen argued that consumption is used as a way to gain and signal status, but he also argued that all consumption is culturally determined and is used to signal identification with a group. [ citation needed]" The latter part of this sentence is also widely accepted by Veblen scholars, but there is no simple citation, and to establish the truth of the last clause requires a longer argument than is appropriate for Wikipedia. So let's just put a period after "signal status" and leave out the last clause. I hope these changes are acceptable. If so, I'll make them when I get a chance. Thanks, InstyProf 20:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Recently, the following text was added to the Veblen page: "Some unaligned practitioners include theorists of the concept of "differential accumulation"." Given that this is not a widely known concept or group, as opposed to a large, official scholarly body such as the Association For Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), is it appropriate to have such a reference on this page? My initial inclination would be to remove this reference. Any thoughts? InstyProf 18:27, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious what Veblen's connection to UT is, i.e. why this article is part of Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Texas at Austin. The word "Texas" does not appear in the article. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 22:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Was he born 1857-07-30 (in text) or 1857-10-30 (in infobox)? Nsaa 22:12, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
In the article on Thorstein Veblen, the mathematician, Oswald Veblen, is cited as being Thorstein's nephew.
However, in the Wikipedia article on Oswald Veblen, Thorstein is mentioned as being is brother.
There is obviously an inconsistency.... that is, one of the articles in wrong on this point.
132.66.222.116 ( talk) 22:24, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
This citation indicates he was born in Valders, WI, not Cato, WI as indicated in the article. Do we know which source is correct? -- ZimZalaBim talk 02:28, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Is there any reason for more than a cursory mention of Technocracy in this article? I'm trimming per WP:weight, but an IP keeps reverting. LK ( talk) 02:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The Britannica article on Veblen (which is longer that ours) has only one mention of technocracy; it is at the end of a paragraph about his later works.
Another series of articles that appeared in The Dial was later published in the book The Engineers and the Price System (1921). In these pieces Veblen developed his ideas for reform of the economic system. He believed that engineers, who had the knowledge to run industry, should take over its direction because they would manage it for efficiency instead of profit. This theme was central to the brief Depression-era movement known as “technocracy.”
It makes no claim that Veblen was ever part of the technocracy movement, rather the technocracy movement took their ideas from him. LK ( talk) 14:38, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
II | ( t - c) 23:20, 15 November 2009 (UTC)Veblen proposes a soviet of engineers in one chapter in The Engineers and the Price System[8]. According to Yngve Ramstad[9], this work's view that engineers, not workers, would overthrow capitalism was a "novel view". Daniel Bell sees an affinity between Veblen and the Technocracy movement[10]
You may be interested but Theses which are available for consultation (ie, held by an academic library for universal borrowing, or distributed by microfilm or web) are now considered reliable sources. They would of course need to come from a real university. Fifelfoo ( talk) 10:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
209.217x is asking that I lift the semi-protection (early). Shall I? Gwen Gale ( talk) 12:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
Veblen may have loved ritz crackers, but there's no way he ate them every single day of his life.
147.9.203.144 ( talk) 16:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
"Experts complained his ideas, while brilliantly presented, were crude, gross, fuzzy, and imprecise; others complained he was a wacky eccentric"
Seriously? A) source for "experts", B) "wacky excentric"? Also, in what way would an economist/sociologist's ideas be "gross"? Is the minute (if any) difference between "fuzzy" and "imprecise" so important that it merits inclusion of both? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.23.230.135 ( talk) 03:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
"Ignorance of Thorstein Veblen" is the title of a section of Chapter 1 (Thinking the Unthinkable) of Michael Dawson's brilliant work, "The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life" . In this work, Dawson quotes C. Wright Mills who called Veblen "the best critic of America that America has produced". This aspect of Veblen's work - as a trenchant and brilliant critic of the sinister and nefarious influence of big business marketing on American life - is curiously missing entirely from this Wikipedia article. It's as I've always said - Wikipedia has a disgusting right-wing bias that makes many of its articles less than worthless. "The real core of Veblen's now-forgotten theory of corporate salesmanship was his view that big business marketing was neither more nor less than a new embodiment of class coercion. While other thinkers of his day were developing early versions of the end of history thesis, Veblen insisted that business society's new class of owners relied just as much on arbitrary carrots and sticks as did prior ruling elites." See pp. 11-14 of Dawson's book for more. I wonder how long it will take for this contribution to be erased? lol. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Georgi Plekhanov ( talk • contribs) 05:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
Experts complained his ideas, while brilliantly presented, were crude, gross, fuzzy, and imprecise; others complained he was a wacky eccentric. Scholars continue to debate exactly what he meant in his convoluted, ironic and satiric essays; he made heavy use of examples of primitive societies, but many examples were pure invention
Come on! This is just silly bias.
I have undone this edit because of its unexplained changes. In particular: unexplained deletion of subsection structure/title "Institutional economics", unexplained deletion of the passage on friction between "business" and "industry", unexplained deletion of internal links (Second Industrial Revolution unlinked, nouveau riche unlinked and misspelled nouveau rich [sic]), unexplained deletion of Veblen's identification of the leisure class (as those who engage in conspicuous leisure or the non-productive use of time for the sake of displaying social status), etc. It would be helpful for transparency and for permitting verification that before such major changes any passages to be deleted would first be challenged explicitly (for ex. using appropriate inline templates) and newly introduced passages would be sufficiently referenced by inline references as far as possible. -- Chris Howard ( talk) 07:47, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
As a result of recent editing by 38.111.224.133, huge portions of this article are now unsourced original research. 32.218.37.157 ( talk) 18:19, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Veblen's articles were highly influential and reached most of the active economists and sociologists the country, who subscribe to QJE, JPE etc. I can imagine why anyone would like to delete them?? Rjensen ( talk) 11:49, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
The "Academic Career" section implies that Veblen had extramarital affairs:
Veblen's students at Chicago considered his teaching "dreadful".[7] Stanford students considered his teaching style "boring". But this was more excusable than some of Veblen's personal affairs. He offended Victorian sentiments with extramarital affairs while at the University of Chicago.[7] At Stanford in 1909, Veblen was ridiculed again for being a womanizer and an unfaithful husband.
But the "Marriages" section is skeptical of that idea:
The two primary relationships that Veblen had were with his two wives. Despite a reputation to the contrary, there is little evidence that he had sexual liaisons with other women.[11]
Is 'determined' about Cause and effect aka etiology – Study of causation, or origination? Is this ' Social determinism'? (One may find it difficult to believe that Veblen asserted that social groups, communities etc, (rather than individuals' decisions, volitions, etc,) are the sole cause of individual actions.) Or, rather than etiology, is he talking about methodology – Study of research methods, in which Veblen is opposed to the mere Methodological side of individualism – Method of analysis in the social sciences which involves analysing individuals but not groups? Anyway, m.i. was popular in the Neoclassical economics which Veblen in that same paragraph disavowed, according to its own page. FatalSubjectivities ( talk) 07:41, 17 May 2023 (UTC)
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | This article has been
mentioned by a media organization:
|
![]() | This article is substantially duplicated by a piece in an external publication. Please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source:
|
The latest rewrite was constructed by leading Veblen scholars, including Anne Mayhew and other members of the Association For Evolutionary Economics. It is much more accurate and comprehensive than the previous entry, so it should please Veblen scholars. Please contact me if you have any concerns. User: InstyProf. Date: March 14, 2007 InstyProf 16:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
The following text is visible if you try to edit this article:
Does this mean I can delete these two paragraphs and rewrite this entire entry (with appropriate sources) without someone yelling at me for mass deletion? -- L. 13:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Thorstein Veblen was an interesting guy, but there's not much biographical information on him here. If someone knows about him, it would be nice if she up a section on it.
What on earth is a "valuational principle?" That's only one of the intrusions of jargon here. Frankly, this article needs a fair deal done to make it truly readable.
Contrary to popular belief, the Veblenian dichotomy is not between the technological and ceremonial. It is between business and industry. The former was emphasized by Ayres and has become incorrectly associated with the Veblenian dichotomy. Now, I know most (people who claim to be) followers of Veblen accept the incorrect notion of the veblenian dichotomy, so its probably against wikipedia's customs to go and change it completely. However, it should be mentioned that some hold the opposing view. William M. Dugger, one of those who rightly considers the Veblenian dichotomy to be business/industry has won the Veblen-Commons award, a sure sign that this correct view is becoming more common amongst Veblenites. The talk page indicates this entry is getting rewritten. So I won't change it now, but this should probably be considered by whoever rewrites the article. (Unsigned comment from User:65.35.245.89 03:31, 8 March 2006)
Does Mencken--a guy who satirized everything and never meant what he said--really deserve credit as an important critic of Veblen? Sure, the contribution by User: Idols of Mud is well-written (and provides a source!), but the whole point of the critique appears to be that Veblen (the Minnesota peasant) has less knowledge of a cow's backside than Mencken (the Baltimore burger), a critique so obviously absurd that it becomes amusing--Mencken's intended effect. Actually, this whole article is kind of a train wreck, but this section about Mencken only makes it worse. Anthon.Eff 15:29, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
InstyProf deleted all of the references in the previous text. I reintroduced them, and added a few more that I was sure of. I also removed a few of his statements. I removed the assertion that Peirce was an important influence on Veblen--unsupported by the biographical sources (check Dorfman), and hard to substantiate by pointing to any specific ideas in Veblen. I also removed some editorializing that didn't seem encyclopedic. Some of InstyProf's statements don't seem correct and I inserted a {{ Fact}} tag to signal that I will remove these if a citation doesn't appear. Otherwise, I think InstyProf is doing good work and am glad that he's here. -- Anthon.Eff 14:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
(1) There is no simple citation to show Peirce's influence on Veblen. So, let's get rid of that. It's widely accepted by many Veblen scholars, but it's probably not crucial. (2) You asked for a citation for the following paragraph: "In 1906, he received an appointment at Stanford University, where he left, it is often written, because of “womanizing.” Though the myth lives on, it seems more likely that rumors that had followed him from the University of Chicago where difficulties with his eccentric first wife had led some to see him, probably wrongly, as a roué, were used to help terminate the employment of a man, equally eccentric, who was widely regarded as a poor teacher and a radical critic." The citation for this argument is the book by Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen and Henry Irven Jorgensen, _Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand_, M.E. Sharpe (April 1999), Chaps. 14 - 18. It might be best to remove the last four words and end the sentence with a period after teacher. Although Jorgensen and Jorgensen imply unhappiness over Veblen's lack of intellectual conformity they much more directly say that it was his eccentric dress and poor teaching that cost him support that might have saved him when his first wife came and mounted her attack. But Jorgensen and Jorgensen do provide powerful evidence that Veblen was not the sexual adventurer that he has been thought. (3) "In this work Veblen argued that consumption is used as a way to gain and signal status, but he also argued that all consumption is culturally determined and is used to signal identification with a group. [ citation needed]" The latter part of this sentence is also widely accepted by Veblen scholars, but there is no simple citation, and to establish the truth of the last clause requires a longer argument than is appropriate for Wikipedia. So let's just put a period after "signal status" and leave out the last clause. I hope these changes are acceptable. If so, I'll make them when I get a chance. Thanks, InstyProf 20:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Recently, the following text was added to the Veblen page: "Some unaligned practitioners include theorists of the concept of "differential accumulation"." Given that this is not a widely known concept or group, as opposed to a large, official scholarly body such as the Association For Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), is it appropriate to have such a reference on this page? My initial inclination would be to remove this reference. Any thoughts? InstyProf 18:27, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm curious what Veblen's connection to UT is, i.e. why this article is part of Wikipedia:WikiProject University of Texas at Austin. The word "Texas" does not appear in the article. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 22:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Was he born 1857-07-30 (in text) or 1857-10-30 (in infobox)? Nsaa 22:12, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
In the article on Thorstein Veblen, the mathematician, Oswald Veblen, is cited as being Thorstein's nephew.
However, in the Wikipedia article on Oswald Veblen, Thorstein is mentioned as being is brother.
There is obviously an inconsistency.... that is, one of the articles in wrong on this point.
132.66.222.116 ( talk) 22:24, 16 March 2008 (UTC)
This citation indicates he was born in Valders, WI, not Cato, WI as indicated in the article. Do we know which source is correct? -- ZimZalaBim talk 02:28, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
Is there any reason for more than a cursory mention of Technocracy in this article? I'm trimming per WP:weight, but an IP keeps reverting. LK ( talk) 02:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
The Britannica article on Veblen (which is longer that ours) has only one mention of technocracy; it is at the end of a paragraph about his later works.
Another series of articles that appeared in The Dial was later published in the book The Engineers and the Price System (1921). In these pieces Veblen developed his ideas for reform of the economic system. He believed that engineers, who had the knowledge to run industry, should take over its direction because they would manage it for efficiency instead of profit. This theme was central to the brief Depression-era movement known as “technocracy.”
It makes no claim that Veblen was ever part of the technocracy movement, rather the technocracy movement took their ideas from him. LK ( talk) 14:38, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
II | ( t - c) 23:20, 15 November 2009 (UTC)Veblen proposes a soviet of engineers in one chapter in The Engineers and the Price System[8]. According to Yngve Ramstad[9], this work's view that engineers, not workers, would overthrow capitalism was a "novel view". Daniel Bell sees an affinity between Veblen and the Technocracy movement[10]
You may be interested but Theses which are available for consultation (ie, held by an academic library for universal borrowing, or distributed by microfilm or web) are now considered reliable sources. They would of course need to come from a real university. Fifelfoo ( talk) 10:06, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
209.217x is asking that I lift the semi-protection (early). Shall I? Gwen Gale ( talk) 12:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
Veblen may have loved ritz crackers, but there's no way he ate them every single day of his life.
147.9.203.144 ( talk) 16:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
"Experts complained his ideas, while brilliantly presented, were crude, gross, fuzzy, and imprecise; others complained he was a wacky eccentric"
Seriously? A) source for "experts", B) "wacky excentric"? Also, in what way would an economist/sociologist's ideas be "gross"? Is the minute (if any) difference between "fuzzy" and "imprecise" so important that it merits inclusion of both? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.23.230.135 ( talk) 03:51, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
"Ignorance of Thorstein Veblen" is the title of a section of Chapter 1 (Thinking the Unthinkable) of Michael Dawson's brilliant work, "The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life" . In this work, Dawson quotes C. Wright Mills who called Veblen "the best critic of America that America has produced". This aspect of Veblen's work - as a trenchant and brilliant critic of the sinister and nefarious influence of big business marketing on American life - is curiously missing entirely from this Wikipedia article. It's as I've always said - Wikipedia has a disgusting right-wing bias that makes many of its articles less than worthless. "The real core of Veblen's now-forgotten theory of corporate salesmanship was his view that big business marketing was neither more nor less than a new embodiment of class coercion. While other thinkers of his day were developing early versions of the end of history thesis, Veblen insisted that business society's new class of owners relied just as much on arbitrary carrots and sticks as did prior ruling elites." See pp. 11-14 of Dawson's book for more. I wonder how long it will take for this contribution to be erased? lol. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Georgi Plekhanov ( talk • contribs) 05:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
Experts complained his ideas, while brilliantly presented, were crude, gross, fuzzy, and imprecise; others complained he was a wacky eccentric. Scholars continue to debate exactly what he meant in his convoluted, ironic and satiric essays; he made heavy use of examples of primitive societies, but many examples were pure invention
Come on! This is just silly bias.
I have undone this edit because of its unexplained changes. In particular: unexplained deletion of subsection structure/title "Institutional economics", unexplained deletion of the passage on friction between "business" and "industry", unexplained deletion of internal links (Second Industrial Revolution unlinked, nouveau riche unlinked and misspelled nouveau rich [sic]), unexplained deletion of Veblen's identification of the leisure class (as those who engage in conspicuous leisure or the non-productive use of time for the sake of displaying social status), etc. It would be helpful for transparency and for permitting verification that before such major changes any passages to be deleted would first be challenged explicitly (for ex. using appropriate inline templates) and newly introduced passages would be sufficiently referenced by inline references as far as possible. -- Chris Howard ( talk) 07:47, 18 September 2014 (UTC)
As a result of recent editing by 38.111.224.133, huge portions of this article are now unsourced original research. 32.218.37.157 ( talk) 18:19, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Veblen's articles were highly influential and reached most of the active economists and sociologists the country, who subscribe to QJE, JPE etc. I can imagine why anyone would like to delete them?? Rjensen ( talk) 11:49, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
The "Academic Career" section implies that Veblen had extramarital affairs:
Veblen's students at Chicago considered his teaching "dreadful".[7] Stanford students considered his teaching style "boring". But this was more excusable than some of Veblen's personal affairs. He offended Victorian sentiments with extramarital affairs while at the University of Chicago.[7] At Stanford in 1909, Veblen was ridiculed again for being a womanizer and an unfaithful husband.
But the "Marriages" section is skeptical of that idea:
The two primary relationships that Veblen had were with his two wives. Despite a reputation to the contrary, there is little evidence that he had sexual liaisons with other women.[11]
Is 'determined' about Cause and effect aka etiology – Study of causation, or origination? Is this ' Social determinism'? (One may find it difficult to believe that Veblen asserted that social groups, communities etc, (rather than individuals' decisions, volitions, etc,) are the sole cause of individual actions.) Or, rather than etiology, is he talking about methodology – Study of research methods, in which Veblen is opposed to the mere Methodological side of individualism – Method of analysis in the social sciences which involves analysing individuals but not groups? Anyway, m.i. was popular in the Neoclassical economics which Veblen in that same paragraph disavowed, according to its own page. FatalSubjectivities ( talk) 07:41, 17 May 2023 (UTC)