[FRIAM] Thorstein Veblen?

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I feel certain I've seen that name before, maybe in the citations for reports on the models of evolutionary economics I once worked on?  I don't know.  But now I *must* read a little deeper.

Tomgram: Ann Jones, Our Veblen Momen
https://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176550/

> Of course, Veblen, who could build a house with his own hands, imagined a working world free of such predators. He envisioned an innovative industrial world in which the labor of producing goods would be performed by machines tended by technicians and engineers. In the advanced factories of his mind’s eye, there was no role, no place at all, for the predatory Business Man. Yet Veblen also knew that the natural-born predator of Gilded Age America was already creating a kind of scaffolding of financial transactions above and beyond the factory floor -- a lattice of loans, credits, capitalizations, and the like -- so that he could then take advantage of the “disruptions” of production caused by such encumbrances to seize yet more profits. In a pinch, the predator was, as Veblen saw it, always ready to go further, to throw a wrench into the works, to move into the role of outright “Saboteur.”
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