If Apple is indeed a Veblen brand (or more accurately, the goods produced by Apple are Veblen Goods) then why not try to raise the price of the next iPhone by $100? For the increase in price might ...

T he social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen, best remembered today for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), was born in 1857 to a family of Wisconsin farmers who had emigrated from Norway.

The title of Elizabeth McKenzie’s new book “The Portable Veblen” isn’t meant to be taken at face value. It is not what it sounds like, a dorm-room anthology of the writings of Progressive Era ...

Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America is back in a new edition. Scott McLemee revisits a scathing classic. Probably the best-known fact about The Higher Learning in America by Thorstein ...

MinnPost’s journalists are out in the community to report on the things that are happening in Minnesota. Your support right now will help fund their work AND keep our news paywall-free. Thorstein ...

Elizabeth McKenzie's funny and lively novel, The Portable Veblen, centers on the engagement of Veblen (named after economist Thorstein Veblen) and Paul, their dysfunctional families, and one very ...

Thorstein Veblen, 1902. Photo courtesy George Eastman Museum archives. On a quiet stretch of country road in rural Rice County there sits a perfectly preserved farmhouse in which one of the great ...

Elizabeth McKenzie's clever, romantic comedy broadcasts quirkiness right on its cover, with its potentially off-putting title and its illustration of a squirrel instead of the interlocked wedding ...

For readers who prefer literary fiction liberally dosed with absurdity and insight, exclamation points and philosophy, foibles and traumas, Elizabeth McKenzie’s novel “The Portable Veblen” is a wild ...