Customer Reviews

The Vested Interests and the Common Man

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was a bit put off by the cultural history build up in the first 30 or so pages but once Veblen hit his stride, I often had to put the book down to absorb the implications of his simple, direct, and useful views. Veblen was championed in my youth by John Kenneth Galbraith which caused me to delay reading him for 40 years; I assumed he was another tendentious hack of the same ilk as JKG. But Veblen is a searingly original thinker bestriding the left-right divide. He fully understands business and manufacturing operations in a way few or no economists do today and he deploys these insights in ways rarely found. I have no doubt that Veblen could manage an underwiting, conduct a time-motion study on the shop floor, reorganize management for greater productivity, and suggest to the board of whatever new ideas for raising capital. His discussion of how intangible values like business goodwill can be monetized through the creation of various financial instruments that create unearned income streams is almost a pre-requisite for understanding today's financial engineering of trading instruments independent of underlying collateral or deliverables. Meanwhile, Veblen's humor is like those easter eggs secreted in software programs - it surprises and delights throughout. This is a book I will reread many times.