The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Thorstein VeblenRead
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.
Interpretation
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.
In practice
During a business workshop, to illustrate the importance of personal branding and wealth, one might quote Veblen.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
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.
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.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
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.
Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.
We want a free market, but we know that the paradox of a 'free' market is that sometimes you have to intervene. You have to make sure it's not the law of the jungle but the laws of democracy that works.
Mere inflation-that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices-may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
True, governments can reduce the rate of interest in the short run. They can issue additional paper money. They can open the way to credit expansion by the banks. They can thus create an artificial boom and the appearance of prosperity. But such a boom is bound to collapse soon or late and to bring about a depression.
Wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Not only do unemployment benefits help families who are hurting; they also put money into their pockets that they'll then spend - and their spending will keep other Americans in jobs.
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