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→Contributions to Economics: Flynn
In Veblen's worldview, both private property and the nation-state were institutions that not only obstructed technological advance but in modern times also threatened mankind with reversion to a second Dark Ages. Veblen was a socialist in believing that a modern industrial economy requires unified, public control. But his skepticism of political authority made him more of an anarchist who rejected notionof of party discipline.
In Veblen's worldview, both private property and the nation-state were institutions that not only obstructed technological advance but in modern times also threatened mankind with reversion to a second Dark Ages. Veblen was a socialist in believing that a modern industrial economy requires unified, public control. But his skepticism of political authority made him more of an anarchist who rejected notionof of party discipline.
Much of Veblen's influence was due to his inimitable literary style. He made such phrases as "conspicuous consumption" and "cultural lag" a part of the common vocabulary. [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Walton Hamilton, and [[Stuart Chase]] were among the economists who considered themselves Veblen's disciples. His influence reached its peak during the [[New Deal]], through such policy makers as [[Rexford Guy Tugwell]] and [[Jerome Frank]]. His witty critiques of capitalism gained their humor as he pretended to be an anthropologist studying a strange society, an approach that influenced [[Sinclair Lewis]]' novel ''Babbitt'' (1922), Robert and Helen Lynd's social anthropology of ''Middletown'' (1929), and later inspired [[John Kenneth Galbraith]].<ref> Clare Virginia Eby, "Babbitt as Veblenian Critique of Manliness." ''American Studies'' 1993 34(2): 5-23. Issn: 0026-3079 </ref>
Much of Veblen's influence was due to his inimitable literary style. He made such phrases as "conspicuous consumption" and "cultural lag" a part of the common vocabulary. [[Wesley Clair Mitchell]], Walton Hamilton, and [[Stuart Chase]] were among the economists who considered themselves Veblen's disciples. His influence reached its peak during the [[New Deal]], through such policy makers as [[Rexford Guy Tugwell]], [[Jerome Frank]] and [[Leon Jopsephson]]. His witty critiques of capitalism gained their humor as he pretended to be an anthropologist studying a strange society, an approach that influenced [[Sinclair Lewis]]' novel ''Babbitt'' (1922), Robert and Helen Lynd's social anthropology of ''Middletown'' (1929), and later inspired [[John Kenneth Galbraith]].<ref> Clare Virginia Eby, "Babbitt as Veblenian Critique of Manliness." ''American Studies'' 1993 34(2): 5-23. Issn: 0026-3079 </ref>
==Criticism==
[[Franklin Roosevelt]] biographer John Flynn commented on Veblen, whom he describes as a "ribald and lawless iconoclast," and the inspiration Veblen had on many [[New Deal]] Brain Trusters:
{{Cquote|Veblen, like so many of his kind, was an unpleasant fellow. He was born in Minnesota in 1857 and went to a small western college where he got himself disliked for his incredible bad manners. From there he took his sneering mind to Johns Hopkins where he hoped to get a scholarship and where, in addition to failing in that, he involved himself in debt from a good deal of promiscuous borrowing. After a period at Yale he went back home where he lay around for several years exploiting a fake illness. Then he married a young lady of wealth and treated himself to many years of idleness. Like [[Marx]] and some other such philosophers he proceeded on the theory that the world owed him a living. At the end of this series of easy sabbaticals he decided to return to college at the age of 34. His wife, of course, eventually left him.
In time he went to the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. He had a brilliant though erratic mind, and his influence on young teachers with radical leanings in New York at Columbia and the New School cannot be exaggerated. In an age when it was the popular thing in college to be in revolt, Veblen supplied his followers with a steady stream of alluring and halfbaked slants on the world around them. The point that stuck with them was that our democratic system of business was run by a lot of ignoramuses and that the remedy was a new structure of society in which the experts - the technicians and the professors - would take over. This was government by the [[liberal elite|elite]], which is precisely what [[Mussolini]] believed in.
Veblen decided that the capitalist system was doomed because it could never produce abundance. It could not do this because the business men who dominated it were systematically engaged in sabotage - that is, the conscious withdrawal of efficiency in order to create scarcity and increase prices. The technicians alone posses the technological knowledge for producing at all times all the goods and services which the population requires. Unfortunately the experts were now under the control of the bankers and the absentee owners who forced them to curtail output. Veblen insisted that the engineers should unite, since they are few in number and could easily do this. "Given time it should not come as a surprise that the guild of the engineers are provoked to put their heads together and disallow that large absentee ownership that goes to make the vested interests and to unmake an industrial system ...
"A general strike of the technological specialists in industry need involve no more than a minute fraction of the whole population; yet it would swiftly bring a collapse of the old order and sweep the timeworn fabric of finance and absentee sabotage into the discard for good and all." <ref>''The Roosevelt Myth'', John T. Flynn, Fox and Wilkes, 1948, Book 2, Chapter 5, The New New Deal. http://www.rooseveltmyth.com/book/fdrmyth_Chapter_Five___The_Dance_of_the_.htm The Dance of the Philosophers]</ref>}}
==Bibliography==
==Bibliography==