Content: The Theory of the Leisure Class The Theory of Business Enterprise The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts The Higher Learning in America Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution The Vested Interests and the Common Man The Engineers and the Price System The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science? The Preconceptions of...

As the Great War raged, Veblen, a leading thinker of his day, pondered just what it would take to create a peaceful world, and what such a world might look like. Veblen's answer (1917) included a league of peaceful and democratic nations, and the neutralization of Germany as a future military threat.

This 1904 volume presciently criticizes the dominance of large corporations in culture and economy, contrasting the goals of business-the making of profit-with the goals of industry-the making of goods. Veblen describes the industrial system as essentially flawed in many ways.

The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labour, which are social institutions of the feudal period (9th–15th c.) that have continued to the modern era.

Veblen asserts that the contemporary

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In his *New York Times* bestsellers *Liar's Poker* and* Moneyball*, Michael Lewis gave us an unprecedented look at what goes on behind the scenes on Wall Street. Now he takes us back across the centuries to explore the four classics that created and defined not just Wall Street, but the entire economic system we live under today. Brought together with Lewis's illuminating editorial commentary, they form an essential reference for any student of economics-in...