"There is a political and financial vested interest in obsolete technical equipment: that underlying conflict between business interests and industrial interests, which Veblen analyzed with great acuteness in The Theory of Business Enterprise, is accentuated by the fact that vast amounts of capital are sunk in antiquated machines and burdensome utilities. Financial acquisitiveness which had originally seeded invention now furthers technical inertia [i.e., in the sense of resistance or drag]. ...Hence the continued design of automobiles in terms of superficial fashions, rather than with any readiness to take advantage of aerodynamic principles in building for comfort and speed and economy: hence the continued purchase of patent rights for improvements which are then quietly extirpated by the monopoly holding them."
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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
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Ch. V "The Neotechnic Phase," p. 266.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thorstein_Veblen
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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).
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