Thorstein Veblen

In the 18th episode of 200 Norwegians, we tell the story of Thorstein Veblen, a Norwegian-American thinker who spent his life trying to understand why wealthy societies so often lose their way.

Veblen died in 1929, alone in a small cabin in California. No obituary appeared. His name had largely vanished from public conversation. Then the stock market crashed—and suddenly America remembered him.

Born to Norwegian immigrant parents on the Midwestern frontier, Veblen grew up in a tight-knit Norwegian community, culturally distant from the America that was rapidly industrializing around him. That distance gave him a peculiar vantage point. He watched the rise of great fortunes, railroads, monopolies, and financiers—and noticed something unsettling. Wealth, he argued, was increasingly detached from productive work and devoted instead to display.

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” not as a slogan, but as a diagnosis of a society that had begun to mistake waste for success.

This episode explores Veblen’s unlikely life—from Norwegian farm communities to elite universities—and why his ideas keep resurfacing during moments of economic crisis. It is a story about status, power, and a question that remains unresolved: what kind of prosperity actually serves society?