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His career began in earnest at the University of Chicago. After arriving in 1892, he helmed the Journal of Political Economy, translated a German economic treatise into English, and wrote a series of solid but unspectacular articles with titles like “The Price of Wheat since 1867.” Cycling and I Think to Myself What A Wonderful World Poster
He also, however, wrote an article on “The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress.” High-end women’s fashions, he observed, are expensive and ever-changing, waste a tremendous amount of fabric, and are so impractical as to render their wearers “manifestly incapable of doing anything that is of any use.” According to Veblen, that was the point. The greater the “conspicuous waste” evident in a lady’s dress, the greater her husband’s wealth. The article is hilarious, as Veblen so often is, but it was also a broadside against the marginalists. Without the ability to distinguish between productive and unproductive consumption, Veblen suggests, economists will miss the true significance of women’s fashion — and who knows what else.
The article on women’s dress previewed The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899 largely at Veblen’s own expense. Drawing on contemporary evolutionary theory and anthropology, Veblen claimed that, as societies moved from lower “savage” to higher “barbarian” stages of development, strong and charismatic figures excused themselves from daily drudgery. Soldiers, priests, and political leaders eventually composed a distinct and highly visible upper class, a leisure class: “[T]he characteristic feature of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment,” wrote Veblen. The key word is conspicuous. Members of the leisure class signaled their exalted status through “conspicuous consumption”: impractically large dwellings, fancy dress and armor, ceremonial pomp — anything visible to all but of practical use to none. They then engaged in competitive “pecuniary emulation,” competing to see who could have the biggest castles, the fanciest dresses, the longest ceremonies. Whoever wasted the most money won top status.
The idea was obvious enough when applied to barbarian chieftains, but Veblen’s real target was the leisure class of his own “civilized” historical stage and its apologists. The book is full of everyday examples that make rich men look silly, their top hats and walking sticks recast as barbarous headdresses and totems. “The walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer’s hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure,” Veblen observes. “But it is also a weapon, and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that ground.”
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