Thorstein Veblen was born in Wisconsin and received his doctorate from Yale University. He was a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago and taught at many other schools. Due to his radical opinions regarding American society, and his skepticism toward religion, he was unable to find a permanent position. In fact, his position at the University of Chicago was due to the fact that his mentor, J. Laurence Laughlin took him on as his assistant. He was offered the position of president for the American Economic Association, but turned it down, and was the managing editor of the Journal of Political Economy for some time. He is probably best known for his critical stance on neoclassical economic ideology, and for his book,"The Theory of the Leisure Class", in which he introduced the term "conspicuous consumption", which is consumption that is done merely to make a statement to others about one's status (in this book, he satirized the conspicuous consumption of Carnegie's contemporaries). He judged the behavior of consumers very severely. According to Veblen, "the habit of pecuniary emulation" is not the only motive for economic activity, but that all motives were affected by it. Veblen was an institutionalist who believed that economists overlooked the importance of social and cultural norms and their effects on economic changes. The following is an excerpt from,"The Limitations of Marginal Utility, Journal of Political Economy:

"The growth and mutations of the institutional fabric are an outcome of the conduct of individual members of the group, since it is out of the experience of individuals, through the habituation of individuals, that institutions arise; and it is in this same experience that these institutions act to direct and define the aims and end of conduct. It is, of course, on individuals that the system of institutions imposes those conventional standards, ideals, and canons of conduct that make up the community's scheme of life. Scientific inquiry in this field, therefore, must deal with individual conduct and must formulate its theoretical results in terms of individual conduct. But such an enquiry can serve the purposes of a genetic theory only if and in so far as this individual conduct is attended to in those respects in which it counts toward habituation, and so toward change (or stability) of the institutional fabric, on the one had, and in those respects in which it is prompted and guided by the received institutional conceptions and ideals on the other hand. The postulates of marginal utility, and the hedonistic preconceptions generally, fail at this point in that they confine the attention to such bearings of economic conduct as are conceived not to be conditioned by habitual standards and ideals and to have no effect in the way of habituation. They disregard or abstract from the causal sequence of propensity and habituation in economic life and exclude from theoretical inquiry all such interest in the facts of cultural growth, in order to attend to those features of the case that are conceived to be idle in this respect. All such facts of institutional force and growth are put on one side as not being germane to pure theory; they are to be taken account of, if at all, by afterthought, by a more or less vague and general allowance for inconsequential disturbances due to occasional human infirmity. Certain institutional phenomena, it is true, are comprised among the premises of hedonists, as has been noted above; but they are included as postulates a priori. "

Works by Thorstein Veblen: