"One might multiply... examples from many departments: they point to a fact about the machine that has not been generally recognized by those quaint apologists for machine-capitalism who look upon every expenditure of horsepower and every fresh piece of mechanical apparatus as an automatic net gain in efficiency. In the Instinct of Workmanship Veblen has indeed wondered whether the typewriter, the telephone, and the automobile, though creditable technological achievements "have not wasted more effort and substance than they have saved," whether they are not to be credited with an appreciable economic loss, because they have increased the pace and the volume of correspondence and communication and travel out of all proportion to the real need."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesSocialists from the United StatesEconomists from the United StatesSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. VI "Compensations and Reversions," pp.271-272.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (30 July 1857 – 3 August 1929) was a Norwegian-American sociologist and economist and a leader of the Efficiency Movement, most famous for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
53 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thorstein Veblen →
Related Quotes
"It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman mus…"
"In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dan…"
"Any evolutionary science... is a close-knit body of theory. It is a theory of a process, of an unfolding sequence... …"
"The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; …"
"In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, co…"
"In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes."
"From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so…"
"The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction."
"However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can mak…"
"The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before."