Wealth & Money Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Veblen’s genius is how he makes “wealth” sound less like security and more like a dress code. The line turns status into a compliance problem: to “stand well” is not to be good, but to look legible to the crowd. Respectability becomes something you purchase, then continually re-purchase, because the standard is “somewhat indefinite” and therefore endlessly movable. That indefiniteness is the whole trap. If there’s no fixed threshold, you can never fully arrive; you can only keep signaling.

The intent is diagnostic, not moralizing. Veblen is describing how a community quietly rewrites social worth into a visible metric, then acts as if it’s natural. “Conventional standard” is doing heavy lifting: these norms aren’t inevitable, they’re agreed-upon fictions that feel compulsory precisely because everyone participates. Even the phrasing “in the eyes” matters. Wealth operates as optics, a public performance staged through consumption, leisure, and taste - what Veblen elsewhere names conspicuous consumption and pecuniary emulation. The community’s gaze polices the boundary between “people like us” and everyone else.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in the Gilded Age, Veblen watched industrial fortunes balloon while older markers of honor (craft, civic virtue, religious standing) got crowded out by the new aristocracy of money. His target isn’t merely the rich; it’s the social machinery that makes inequality feel like common sense. The quote still lands because modern life keeps inventing fresh “indefinite” thresholds - the right neighborhood, the right phone, the right wellness regimen - and calling them normal.