Thorstein veblen brief biography of martin garrix

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Thorstein Bunde Veblen July 30, — August 3, was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Veblen laid the foundation for the perspective of institutional economics.

Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy. His emphasis on conspicuous consumption greatly influenced economists who engaged in non- Marxist critiques of fascism , capitalism , and technological determinism. His parents had emigrated from Valdres , Norway to Milwaukee , Wisconsin, on September 16, , with few funds and no knowledge of English.

They migrated to Milwaukee via Drammen , Hamburg and Quebec. Veblen began his schooling at age five. Although Norwegian was his first language, he learned English from neighbors and at school. His parents also learned to speak English fluently, though they continued to read predominantly Norwegian literature with and around their family on the farmstead.

The family farm eventually grew more prosperous, allowing Veblen's parents to provide their children with formal education. Unlike most immigrant children of the time, Veblen and all of his siblings received training in lower schools and went on to receive higher education at nearby Carleton College. Veblen's sister, Emily, was reputedly the first daughter of Norwegian immigrants to graduate from an American college.

Several commentators saw Veblen's ethnic-Norwegian background and his relative "isolation from American society" in Minnesota as essential to the understanding of his writings. Harvard University sociologist David Riesman maintained that Veblen's background as a child of immigrants meant that Veblen was alienated from his parents' original culture, but that his "living in a Norwegian society within America" made him unable to "assimilate and accept the available forms of Americanism " completely.