[FRIAM] Thorstein Veblen?

[Barry MacKichan]

Personal notes, off topic.

Thorstein Veblen wrote Theory of the Leisure Class and, I believe, 
originated the phrase “conspicuous consumption”. For the 
mathematicians out there, Thorstein’s brother (I think. Considering 
the age of these recollections he might have been a cousin) was Oswald 
Veblen, one of the first mathematicians appointed a permanent member of 
the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s.

One of my roommates freshman year at Harvard was John Veblen, the great 
grandson of one of these. His father was a lawyer in Seattle. When I 
went to Microsoft, John was living in Seattle, and another of my 
freshman roommates was in the math department of the U. of Washington. 
The math roommate and his wife had become good friends with John’s 
parents (who were god-parents to their children) and my wife and I 
joined them for Thanksgiving dinners for several years and we joined 
their book club until we move to Bainbridge Island several years later.

I mention this only as another bit of evidence that the world is smaller 
than you think.

--Barry

On 11 Apr 2019, at 17:00, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> 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.”
>>
>
>
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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