To Veblen, the rise of a conspicuously consuming leisure class wasn’t a sign of progress. It was a relic of barbarism, an evolutionary step from feudalism, and, hence, un-American. The equation of luxury with British tyranny and decadence, which took hold in the revolutionary era, persisted through much of the 19th century. Since primogeniture had been abolished in America early on, and there wasn’t much point in possessing huge tracts of land when vast territories were available to the adventurous, the nation had little in the way of dynastic wealth or large enterprises. The Civil War crushed the one peculiar institution that had enabled a small-scale leisure class in the slaveholding South. But by the 1880s and 1890s, the new technologies — telegraph, steam, railroad, electricity — that had forged a national market in goods and services, and the rise of Wall Street as a financial center, were allowing businesspeople to amass great wealth practically overnight. For the first time, America had individuals capable of single-handedly conjuring into existence institutions like Rockefeller’s University of Chicago, where Veblen taught political economy.

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Stout Scandinavian Midwesterner that he was, Veblen hated waste and loved efficiency. And leisure, which he defined as “nonproductive consumption of time,” was wasteful. But “The Theory of the Leisure Class” is more than a polemic; it’s one of the first works of pop sociology, and one that sold well despite a distinct lack of Gladwellian zing. There’s a little Darwin — “life in a modern industrial community . . . acts by a process of selection to develop and conserve a certain range of aptitude and propensities” — and plenty of Marx. There’s also a healthy measure of anthropology. We learn of Polynesian kings who would starve rather than use their own hands to feed themselves, and why college football players seem to be inordinately devout. At times Veblen is a proto-Seinfeld, unintentionally dabbling in Victorian-era observational humor: “No explanation at all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of changing fashions.”

Although the book was written in the infancy of American social science, chunks of it anticipate more sophisticated arguments made by present-day economists. As some people grow so wealthy that they can’t spend all their money on themselves, “the aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments” — which pretty much explains Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group inviting friends and frenemies to his $5 million 60th birthday party. But it’s not just hedge-fund guys who are driven to spend for the sake of display. The Cornell economist Robert H. Frank has argued that the demand for “positional goods” like bigger houses and private-school education has created a financial arms race from the top down. Here’s Veblen: “The members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal.”

Veblen called out the domestic leisure class for mimicking their decadent European antecedents. My work as an economics journalist occasionally takes me into the private lives of billionaires, and it’s amazing the degree to which tough, self-made businessmen still mimic the habits of the fey European nobility. Once, as I entered the office of one magnate, a generation removed from the shtetl, my eyes were drawn to a photo of him, clad in tweed and boots, rifle on his shoulder, dead ducks fanned out at his feet under a gray British sky.

Yet other parts of Veblen’s argument simply clang. “The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized industrial community,” he writes. Back then, an industrial baron could embark on a leisurely European Grand Tour without worrying that his company would be disintermediated before he crossed the Atlantic. But today, Wall Street billionaires can be reduced to mere millionaires in a few months, and dot-com entrepreneurs can go from flip-flops to Gucci loafers and back again in a single business cycle.