Thorstein Veblen

(1857 - 1929)

Born in 1857 to two Norwegian farmers in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, the sixth of twelve children, Thorstein Veblen received his PhD from Yale University in 1884 but then failed to secure a teaching position, in part because he was an avowed agnostic. In 1892 he found a place for himself at the University of Chicago, where he remained until 1906, publishing in the middle of that period his first, and best-known, book in which he coined the terms conspicuous consumption, pecuniary emulation, and honorific waste.