QuoteProject
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
Thorstein Veblen
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that social status in an industrial society is tied to wealth and the visible display of consumption.

Thorstein Veblen argues that in a highly organized industrial society, a person's reputation is heavily dependent on their financial strength. To establish and maintain a good name, individuals often engage in conspicuous consumption, whereby they showcase their wealth through luxury goods and leisure activities, reflecting their economic power and social standing.

Themes

ReputationWealthConsumptionStatusLeisure

In practice

Example use cases

During a business workshop, to illustrate the importance of personal branding and wealth, one might quote Veblen.

More from Thorstein Veblen

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Thorstein VeblenRead
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
Thorstein VeblenRead
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
Thorstein VeblenRead
With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.
Thorstein VeblenRead
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
Thorstein VeblenRead
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.
Thorstein VeblenRead

Similar quotes

Constructive trade, the two-way exchange of goods and services, is the most efficient and logical way for each nation . . . to build a stable prosperity, a prosperity based not on aid, but on mutually beneficial economic contacts.
Ronald ReaganRead
We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.
Franklin D. RooseveltRead
What drags down our entire economy is when there's an ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else.
Barack ObamaRead
Trade is now clearly designed to favor the wealthiest and most powerful corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The three wealthiest people on earth now control more assets than the combined incomes of 600 million people in the world's 48 poorest countries.
Jim WallisRead
The benefit of appointing a hawkish central banker is the increased inflation-fighting credibility that such an appointment brings.
Ben BernankeRead
One way to have broader access to wealth is to reduce the tax on the large group and increase the tax on the very top so concentration of wealth doesn't get to extreme levels.
Thomas PikettyRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.