Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Thorstein Veblen, fully Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen

Norwegian-American Sociologist and Economist, Leader of the Institutional Economics Movement

"Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar....Innovation is bad form."

"Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation, but they acquired their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present."

"Customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making an invidious pecuniary comparison-in so far as it is conceived that it could not have become customary and prescriptive without the backing of this principle of pecuniary reputability or relative economic success."

"Decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and thrives in full measure only under a regime of status."

"Deviations from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious to all men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not simply an adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral feature of the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum...A breach of faith may be condoned, but a breach of decorum cannot. "Manners maketh man.""

"Devout consumption is of the nature of vicarious consumption. This canon of devout austerity is based on the pecuniary reputability of conspicuously wasteful consumption, backed by the principle that vicarious consumption should conspicuously not conduce to the comfort of the vicarious consumer."

"Does the total net loss suffered by the community at large, exclusive of the owners of these intangibles, exceed two-hundred percent of the returns which go to these owners? or, Do these intangibles cost the community more than twice what they are worth to the owners? -- the loss to the community being represented by the sum of the overhead burden carried on account of these intangibles plus the necessary curtailment of production involved in maintaining profitable prices. The overhead burden is paid out of the net annual production, after the net annual production has been reduced by so much as may be necessary to "maintain prices at a reasonably profitable figure.""

"During the past one hundred years there is a tendency perceptible, in the development of men's dress especially, to discontinue methods of expenditure and the use of symbols of leisure which must have been irksome... the continuation of which among the upper classes today would be a work of supererogation; as, for instance, the use of powdered wigs and of gold lace, and the practice of constantly shaving the face. There has of late years been some slight recrudescence of the shaven face in polite society, but this is probably a transient and unadvised mimicry of the fashion imposed upon body servants, and it may fairly be expected to go the way of the powdered wig of our grandfathers."

"During the predatory culture labor comes to be associated in men's habits of thought with weakness and subjection to a master. It is therefore a mark of inferiority... accounted unworthy of man in his best estate...labor is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out. On the contrary, with the advance of social differentiation it has acquired the axiomatic force due to ancient and unquestioned prescription."

"During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during the earlier development of industry within ... this general stage... Women and other slaves are highly valued, both as an evidence of wealth and as a means of accumulating wealth. Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral one, they are the usual form of investment for a profit...women even come to serve as a unit of value... as for instance in Homeric times. Where this is the case... the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery... The accepted evidence of wealth is the possession of many women, and presently also of other slaves."

"Each class envies and emulates the class next above it in the social scale, while it rarely compares itself with those below or with those who are considerably in advance."

"Each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established. When a step in the development has been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably."

"Employments fall into a hierarchical gradation of reputability. Those which have to do immediately with ownership on a large scale are the most reputable of economic employments proper. Next to these in good repute come those employments that are immediately subservient to ownership and financiering?such as banking and the law."

"Entrance to the leisure class lies through the pecuniary employments. ..The discipline of the pecuniary employments acts to conserve and to cultivate certain of the predatory aptitudes and the predatory animus...the pecuniary employments give proficiency in the general line of practices comprised under fraud, rather than in those that belong under the more archaic method of forcible seizure."

"Even as regards personal ornaments it is to be added that their chief purpose is to lend ‚clat to the person of their wearer (or owner) by comparison with other persons who are compelled to do without."

"Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonor attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come in as one of the early consequences of ownership."

"Even those varieties of the dog which have been bred into grotesque deformity by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs?and the like is true of other fancy-bred animals?are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this differential utility... is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial value of canine monstrosities, such as the prevailing styles of pet dogs both for men's and women's use, rests on their high cost of production, and their value to their owners lies chiefly in their utility as items of conspicuous consumption."

"Even today there are few of the better class who are not possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labor. We have a realizing sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in an especial degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of thought with menial service...Vulgar surroundings, mean (that is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane?with "high thinking"."

"Ever since these enlightened principles of the modern point of view were first installed in the eighteenth century as the self-evident rule of reason in civilized life, the industrial arts have also continued to gain in productive efficiency, at an ever-accelerated rate of gain; so that today the industrial methods of the machine era are highly productive, beyond any earlier state of the industrial arts or anything that is known outside the range of this new order of industry. The output of this industrial system yields a wider margin of net product over cost than has ever been obtainable by any other or earlier known method of work. It consequently affords ground for an uncommonly substantial vested interest in this disposable net margin."

"Expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps, more universally practiced in the matter of dress than in any other line of consumption."

"Fashions are least stable and least becoming in those communities where the principle of a conspicuous waste of goods asserts itself most imperatively, as among ourselves."

"For a creative principle, capable of serving as motive to invention and innovation in fashions, we shall have to go back to the primitive, non-economic motive with which apparel originated?the motive of adornment...The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted."

"Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty and regard for life, may, within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the individual in the pecuniary culture. The highly successful men of all times have commonly been of this type; except those whose success has not been scored in terms of either wealth or power."

"From the days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognized by thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even a blameless, human life."

"From the foregoing survey of the growth of conspicuous leisure and consumption, it appears that the utility of both alike for the purposes of reputability lies in the element of waste [of time and effort] that is common to both."

"From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons."

"From this arises one of the singularities of the current situation in business and its control of industry; viz., that the total face value, or even the total market value of the vendible securities which cover any given block of industrial equipment and material resources, and which give title to its ownership, always and greatly exceeds the total market value of the equipment and resources to which the securities give title of ownership, and to which alone in the last resort they do give title. The margin by which the capitalized value of the going concern exceeds the value of its material properties is commonly quite wide. Only in the case of small and feeble corporations, or such concerns as are balancing along the edge of bankruptcy, does this margin of intangible values narrow down and tend to disappear. Any industrial business concern which does not enjoy such a margin of capitalized free earning-capacity has fallen short of ordinary business success and is possessed of no vested interest."

"Goods are humilific, and therefore unattractive, if they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought and do not include a margin of expensiveness on which to rest a complacent invidious comparison."

"Good-will has long been known, discussed and allowed for as a legitimate, ordinary and valuable immaterial possession of men engaged in mercantile enterprise of all kinds. It has been held to be a product of exemplary courtesy and fair dealing with customers, due to turning out goods or services of an invariably sound quality and honest measure, and indeed due to the conspicuous practice of the ordinary Christian virtues, but chiefly to common honesty. Similarly valuable, and of a similarly immaterial nature, is the possession of a trade-secret, a trade-mark, a patent-right, a franchise, any statutory monopoly, or a monopoly secured by effectually cornering the supply or the market for any given line of goods or services. After the analogy of good-will, it has been usual to trace any such special run of free income to the profitable use of a special advantage in the market."

"He is persuaded that high prices and a scant supply of goods at a high labor cost is a desirable state of things. This is incredible, but there is no denying the fact."

"He knows, of course, that the profits of business go to the business men, the vested interests, and to no one else; but he is still beset with the picturesque hallucination that any unearned income which goes to those vested interests whose central office is in New Jersey is paid to himself in some underhand way, while the gains of those vested interests that are domiciled in Canada are obviously a grievous net loss to him. The tariff moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform."

"Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up... And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men... would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper."

"Here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity."

"Here occurs a curious inversion...in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household...It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure...the housewife's efforts are under the guidance of traditions that have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is achieved... they must be achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable, "presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia are... items of conspicuous consumption, and... apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious leisure rendered by the housewife."

"However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods."

"However, it is well to call to mind that the community will still be able to get along, perhaps even to get along very tolerably, in spite of a very appreciable volume of sabotage of this kind; even though it does reduce the net productive capacity to a fraction of what it would be in the absence of all this interference and retardation; for the current state of the industrial arts is highly productive."

"If any portion or class of society is sheltered from the action of the environment in any essential respect, that portion of the community, or that class, will adapt its views and its scheme of life more tardily to the altered general situation; it will in so far tend to retard the process of social transformation. The wealthy leisure class is in such a sheltered position with respect to the economic forces that make for change and readjustment."

"If it?s working were not disturbed by other economic forces or other features of the emulative process, the immediate effect of... a pecuniary struggle... would be to make men industrious and frugal...This is more especially true of the laboring classes in a sedentary community which is at an agricultural stage of industry, in which there is a considerable subdivision of industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these classes a more or less definite share of the product of their industry...since labor is their recognized and accepted mode of life, they take some emulative pride in a reputation for efficiency in their work."

"If we go a step back of this exemplary barbarian culture, into the lower stages of barbarism, we no longer find the leisure class in fully developed form. But this lower barbarism shows the usages, motives, and circumstances out of which the institution of a leisure class has arisen, and indicates the steps of its early growth...In nearly all these tribes the women are, by prescriptive custom, held to those employments out of which the industrial occupations proper develop at the next advance. The men are exempt from these vulgar employments and are reserved for war, hunting, sports, and devout observances."

"If, as is sometimes assumed, the incentive to accumulation were the want of subsistence or of physical comfort, then the aggregate economic wants of a community might conceivably be satisfied at some point in the advance of industrial efficiency; but since the struggle is substantially a race for reputability on the basis of an invidious comparison, no approach to a definitive attainment is possible."

"If, in addition to showing that the wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a livelihood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree. Our dress, therefore... should not only he expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor."

"Immaterial evidences of past leisure are quasi-scholarly or quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human life...unless these accomplishments had approved themselves as serviceable evidence of an unproductive expenditure of time, they would not have survived and held their place as conventional accomplishments of the leisure class."

"In a general way, the element of waste tends to predominate in articles of consumption, while the contrary is true of articles designed for productive use. Even in articles which appear... to serve for pure ostentation only, it is always possible to detect the presence of some, at least ostensible, useful purpose... even in special machinery and tools contrived for some particular industrial process, as well as in the rudest appliances of human industry, the traces of conspicuous waste, or at least of the habit of ostentation, usually become evident on a close scrutiny."

"In a sense which has been greatly qualified in scope and rigor, but which has by no means lost its meaning even yet... tradition says that the woman, being a chattel, should consume only what is necessary to her sustenance,?except so far as her further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute of her master."

"In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty."

"In all but the lowest stages of culture the normally constituted man is comforted and upheld in his self-respect by "decent surroundings" and by exemption from "menial offices"."

"In all innovations in dress... the requirement of conspicuous waste prevents the purposefulness of these innovations from becoming anything more than a somewhat transparent pretense."

"In any community where conspicuous consumption is an element of the scheme of life, an increase in an individual's ability to pay is likely to take the form of an expenditure for some accredited line of conspicuous consumption."

"In communities where the popular habits of thought have been profoundly shaped by the patriarchal tradition we may accordingly look for survivals of the tabu on luxuries at least to the extent of a conventional deprecation of their use by the unfree and dependent class."

"In economic theory, the priest is a body servant, constructively in attendance upon the person of the divinity whose livery he wears. His livery is of a very expensive character, as it should be in order to set forth in a beseeming manner the dignity of his exalted master; but it is contrived to show that the wearing of it contributes little or nothing to the physical comfort of the wearer, for it is an item of vicarious consumption, and the repute which accrues from its consumption is to be imputed to the absent master, not to the servant."