The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class
Author: Nikolaĭ Bukharin
Publisher:
Published: 1927
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
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The Theory of the Leisure Class
Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher: The Floating Press
Published: 2009-05-01
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13: 1775411249
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConsidered the first in-depth critique of consumerism, economist Thorstein Veblen's 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class has come to be regarded as one of the great works of economic theory. Using contemporary and anthropological accounts, Veblen held that our economic and social norms are driven by traces of our early tribal life, rather than ideas of utility.
The Sum of Small Things
Author: Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-05-15
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 1400884691
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all In today’s world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society “the aspirational class” and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide. Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices. With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.
Veblen
Author: Charles Camic
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2020-11-30
Total Pages: 505
ISBN-13: 0674659724
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women. Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider. In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics. Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”
The Tourist
Author: Dean MacCannell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2013-08-31
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 0520280008
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this classic analysis of travel and sightseeing, author Dean MacCannell brings social scientific understandings to bear on tourism in the postindustrial age, during which the middle class has acquired leisure time for international travel. In The Tourist—now with a new introduction framing it as part of a broader contemporary social and cultural analysis—the author examines notions of authenticity, high and low culture, and the construction of social reality around tourism.
Conspicuous Consumption
Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2005-08-25
Total Pages: 83
ISBN-13: 0141964316
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWith its wry portrayal of a shallow, materialistic 'leisure class' obsessed by clothes, cars, consumer goods and climbing the social ladder, this withering satire on modern capitalism is as pertinent today as when it was written over a century ago.
The Engineers and the Price System
Author: Thorstein Veblen
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 1921
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThorstein Veblen
Author: John P. Diggins
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999-06-10
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780691006543
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFired by Stanford and the University of Chicago but recommended by his peers to the presidency of the American Economic Association, Thorstein Veblen remains a baffling figure. In part because he was an eccentric who shunned publicity. Veblen is best known to the public as coiner of the term "conspicuous consumption", and known to scholars as one of many social critics of the reform-minded Progressive Era. This is a critical biography, originally published as "The Bard of Savagery". It attempts to unravel the riddles that surround his reputation, and to assess his varied and important contributions to modern social theory.
Inequality And Global Supra-surplus Capitalism
Author: E Ray Canterbery
Publisher: World Scientific
Published: 2018-01-18
Total Pages: 379
ISBN-13: 9813200847
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is written as a sequel to John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, and provides a theoretical framework, for the first time, for surpra-surplus capitalism.Conventional economics has the income and wealth distributions as 'givens'. This assumption immediately excludes such distributions from economic and social concern. Occasionally, economists such as Kenneth Boulding and even earlier, Michal Kalecki, have attempted to develop alternative perspectives in which such distributions are integral to the story and therefore have implications for public policy. At the same time, conventional microeconomics is a theory of price only in which economic efficiency (in an engineering sense) is the only value to be optimized. The income or wealth distributions are given as constraints. Mathematically, the constraints thereafter become invisible; they have no further role to play. The choices that are presumed to be made are neither inhibited nor facilitated by a household's position in the income or wealth distributions.This volume will explore problems with conventional theory and policy, but its main thrust comprises a theory of supra-surplus capitalism, applicable to both developed and developing countries, and its relation to inequalities worldwide.
Modern Economic Classics-Evaluations Through Time
Author: Bernard S. Katz
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-02-03
Total Pages: 550
ISBN-13: 1351982389
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this book, first published in 1988, the editors have included the reviews of thirteen classic works on economic theory, empirical economic studies, political economy and management. Each major work was chosen due to its contribution in shaping our current knowledge and perspectives, and each essay is commented on by important critics in different eras. This title will be of interest to students of economic thought.
