Chapter 28 - Three Veblenian Contexts: Valdres, Norway and Europe; Filiations of Economics; and Economics for an Age of Crises

Summary

After Ireland, Norway was the country that lost the largest part of its population through migration to America, and one of the Norwegian areas that lost the most was the inland region of Valdres, where the family of US economist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) came from. Most Norwegians have some family or relation who left for America, and I am no exception. I grew up with stories about the United States and what to me seemed like an exotic tribe: the Norwegian-Americans (norskamerikanerne).

I later found it fascinating that one of these Norwegian-Americans was an important economist, but I found reading Veblen challenging. Eventually, however, I was able to make the words of a 1920 reviewer of Veblen my own:

Reading him tightens the muscles and stiffens the intellectual spine. One comes away from him a bit bruised and panting but with a sense of power exerted and power achieved. It has been suggested that someone ought to rewrite Mr. Veblen, to put him into such flowing measures as would delight the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. But then there would be no Mr. Veblen.

Reading Veblen in the 1970s, the capitalism he described was as unfamiliar as Marx's ‘army of the unemployed’. Veblen's idea that business could represent some modern version of piracy sounded just as strange as when he proposed that one of the tools of business was sabotage. But in today's context, when money is made in a financial casino which feeds on shrinking national economies, as Greece has experienced, when Enron had its regulated electricity prices increased in California after having created an artificial blackout, and when close to half of Spanish youth is unemployed, these concepts again make eminent sense. Veblen's is a type of economics which comes alive in times of crisis. Contexts are therefore indispensable in order to understand him and his work.

Context 1: Valdres, Norway and European Idealism at the Time of Veblen

‘Veblen the Norwegian’ is well covered in the next three chapters of the book from where this chapter is taken. This chapter provides some additional comments relating specifically to Veblen's Valdres and to his ideals from a Norwegian and European perspective.