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Thorstein Bunde Veblen
(30 Jul 1857 - 3 Aug 1929)
American economist and social critic who was a founder of institutional economics. He was an iconoclastic critic of the effects of business on society and culture. Veblen coined the phrases “conspicuous consumption” and “pecuniary emulation.”
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Science Quotes by Thorstein Bunde Veblen (5 quotes)
Invention is the mother of necessity.
— Thorstein Bunde Veblen
In The Instinct of Workmanship: And the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), 316.
The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.
— Thorstein Bunde Veblen
In Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899, 1912), 198.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
— Thorstein Bunde Veblen
'Evolution of the Scientific Point of View', essay, collected in The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays (1919), 33.
These expert men, technologists, engineers, or whatever name may best suit them, make up the indispensable General staff of the industrial system; and without their immediate and unremitting guidance and correction the industrial system will not work. It is a mechanically organized structure of technical processes designed, installed, and conducted by these production engineers. Without them and their constant attention the industrial equipment, the mechanical appliances of industry, will foot up to just so much junk.
— Thorstein Bunde Veblen
Collected in 'The Captains of Finance and the Engineers', The Engineers and the Price System (1921), 69. Previously published in The Dial (1919).
Whatever the common-sense of earlier generations may have held in this respect, modern common-sense holds that the scientist’s answer is the only ultimately true one. In the last resort enlightened common-sense sticks by the opaque truth and refuses to go behind the returns given by the tangible facts.
— Thorstein Bunde Veblen
From 'The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation', American Journal of Sociology (Mar 1906), 11, collected in The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation and Other Essays (1919), 4.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
