Thorstein Veblen

And so that's what's scaring me is that I actually think that the crash will come when it's politically advantageous for some people in power right now to allow it to occur.

Yeah, I know folks who are kind of rereading Thorstein Veblen's old stuff on, like, sabotage and how, like, you know, like, wealthy people have the ability to kind of, like, screw up the economy, and that's part of what power is.

Dana, you got a new book coming up.

And we have just

So if you go back to...

For me, this idea of luxury belief, it starts with the sociologist Thorstein Veblen.

So he wrote this book in 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class.

And in this book, this is the turn of the 20th century, Veblen, who a lot of people are familiar with, he coined these ideas of conspicuous consumption, of people exhibiting their status through their material goods, articles of clothing and jewelry.

And so that's what's scaring me is that I actually think that the crash will come when it's politically advantageous for some people in power right now to allow it to occur.

Yeah, I know folks who are kind of rereading Thorstein Veblen's old stuff on like sabotage and how like, you know, like wealthy people have the ability to kind of like screw up the economy.

And that's part of what power is.

Dana, you got a new book coming up.

And so that's what's scaring me is that I actually think that the crash will come when it's politically advantageous for some people in power right now to allow it to occur.

Yeah, I know folks who are kind of rereading Thorstein Veblen's old stuff on like sabotage and how like, you know, like wealthy people have the ability to kind of like screw up the economy.

And that's part of what power is.

Dana, you got a new book coming up.

PROFESSOR VEBLIN Ten or twelve years ago, being engaged in a bombastic discussion with what was then known as an intellectual socialist, like the rest of the intelligentsia, he succumbed to the first five corps of the war, pulled down the red flag, damned Marx as a German spy, and began whooping for Elihu Root, Otto Kahn, and Abraham Lincoln.

I was greatly belabored and incommoded by his long quotations from a certain Professor Dr. Thorstein Veblen, then quite unknown to me.

My antagonist manifestly attached a great deal of importance to these borrowed sagacities, for he often heaved them at me in lengths of a column or two and urged me to read every word of them.

I tried hard enough, but found it impossible going.

The more I read them, in fact, the less I could make of them, and so in the end, growing impatient and impolite, I denounced this Professor Veblen as a geyser of pish-posh, refused to waste any more time upon his incomprehensible syllogisms, and applied myself to the other socialist witnesses in the case seeking to set fire to their shirts that old debate which took place by mail for the socialist lived like a munitions patriot on his country estate and i was a wage-slave attached to a city newspaper was afterwards embalmed in a dull book and made the mild pother of a day the book by name men versus the man is now as completely forgotten as baxter's saint's rest or the constitution of the united states i myself perhaps the only man who remembers it at all have not looked into it for six or eight years and all i can recall of my opponent's argument beyond the fact that it not only failed to convert me to the nascent bolshevism of the time but left me a bitter and incurable scoffer at democracy in all its forms is his curious respect for the aforesaid professor dr thorstein veblen and his delight in the learned gentleman's long tortuous and to me at least intolerably flapdoodlish phrases was indeed a time when i forgot even this when my mind was empty of the professor's very name that was say from nineteen o nine or thereabout to the middle of nineteen seventeen during those years having lost all my old superior interest in socialism even as an amateur psychiatrist i ceased to read its literature and thus lost track of its great thinkers the periodicals that i then gave an eye to setting aside newspapers were chiefly the familiar american imitations of the english weeklies of opinion and in these the dominant great thinker was first the late professor dr william james and after his decease professor dr john dewey the reign of james as the illuminated will recall was long and glorious for three or four years running he was mentioned in every one of those american spectators and saturday reviews at least once a week and often a dozen times among the less somber gazettes of the republic to be sure there were other heroes maeterlinck revendranath tagore judge ben b lindsay and the late major-general roosevelt tom larsen and so on Still further down the literary and intellectual scale there were yet others, Hall Cain, Brough, and Jack Johnson among them, with paper-bag cookery and the twilight sleep to dispute their popularity.

But on the majestic level of the old nation, among the white and lavender peaks of professorial ratiocination, there was scarcely a serious rival to James.

now and then perhaps jane adams had a month of vogue and during one winter there was a rage for bergson and for a short space the unspeakable bernsdorff tried to set up youkin now damned with wagner nietzsche and ludendorff but taking one day with another james held his own against the field his ideas immediately they were stated became the ideas of every pedagogue from harvard to leland stanford and the pedagogues labouring furiously at space rates rammed them into the skulls of the lesser cerebelli to have called james an ass during the year nineteen o nine would have been as fatal as to have written a sentence like this one without having used so many halves He died a bit later, but his ghost went marching on.

Whole regiments and brigades of them yielded in stealthy privacy to rebellious and often incomprehensible yearnings.