Thorstein Veblen - Wealth Quotes

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The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.

Thorstein Veblen
There are all degrees of this helplessness that characterizes the common lot. So much so that certain classes, professions, and occupations — such as the clergy, the military, the courts, police, and legal profession — are perhaps to be classed as belonging primarily with the vested interests, although they can scarcely be counted as vested interests in their own right, but rather as outlying and subsidiary vested interests whose tenure is conditioned on their serving the purposes of those principal and self-directing vested interests whose tenure rests immediately on large holdings of invested wealth. Read more at location 2158

Thorstein Veblen
Invested wealth in large holdings controls the country's industrial system, directly by ownership of the plant, as in the mechanical industries, or indirectly through the market, as in farming. So that the population of these civilized countries now falls into two main classes: those who own wealth invested in large holdings and who thereby control the conditions of life for the rest; and those who do not own wealth in sufficiently large holdings, and whose conditions of life are therefore controlled by these others. It is a division, not between those who have something and those who have nothing — as many socialists would be inclined to describe it — but between those who own wealth enough to make it count, and those who do not.

Thorstein Veblen
This free income which the community allows its kept classes in the way of returns on these vested rights and intangible assets is the price which the community is paying to the owners of this imponderable wealth for material damage greatly exceeding that amount. But it should be kept in mind and should be duly credited to the good intentions of these businesslike managers, that the ulterior object sought by all this management is not the 100 per cent of mischief to the community but only the 10 per cent of private gain for themselves and their clients.

Thorstein Veblen
However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods.

Thorstein Veblen
It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession of wealth.

Thorstein Veblen
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.

Thorstein Veblen
The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law.

Thorstein Veblen
Wealth is now itself intrinsically honorable and confers honor on its possessor.

Thorstein Veblen
Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.

Thorstein Veblen