PERSON
Thorstein Veblen
The maverick American economist who identified the instinct of workmanship as a biological drive essential to human flourishing, conspicuous consumption as the social mechanism that systematically subverts it, and the leisure class as the class that extracts value from production while establishing norms that make genuine workmanship economically irrational.
Thorstein Veblen was the economist who looked at the economy and saw the instincts. In 1899, when the standard tools of political economy were price theory and rational self-interest, Veblen published
The Theory of the Leisure Class and introduced a different framework: human behavior is shaped not by calculation but by drives, and the most consequential of these drives is the
instinct of workmanship—the biological disposition toward skilled, purposeful production, the satisfaction derived from competent performance regardless of its economic reward. Against this drive, Veblen placed the social mechanism that systematically frustrates it:
pecuniary emulation, the tendency of each class to imitate the consumption patterns of the class above, and the
leisure class that establishes, through conspicuous abstention from production, the norms by which all other classes orient themselves. The AI age is the moment Veblen’s framework has been waiting for. The cognitive loom—the language