Daily Inspiration Quote by Thorstein Veblen

Veblen drops the polite fiction that reputation is earned through virtue or talent and points instead to the blunt machinery of money. In a "highly organized industrial community", status doesn’t float on character; it’s underwritten by what he calls pecuniary strength. The line is icy because it treats "good repute" as a social technology: a credentialing system that needs proof, and the most legible proof is waste.

The subtext is that leisure and consumption aren’t innocent pleasures but public signals. Leisure matters not as rest but as exemption from necessity - time visibly removed from productive labor. Conspicuous consumption works the same way: goods become evidence that you can afford inefficiency, that you can buy beyond need, even beyond taste. Veblen’s cynicism is surgical; he’s not railing at individual greed so much as describing a community that trains its members to read wealth as worth. When people "gain or retain a good name" through display, morality gets outsourced to market visibility.

Context sharpens the bite. Writing in the Gilded Age, Veblen watched industrial capitalism create enormous fortunes alongside a culture desperate to rationalize them. His target isn’t just the rich, but the aspirational middle who imitate the codes of the leisure class, turning consumption into a ladder and anxiety into an engine. The quote still lands because it frames status as performance under an economic regime: if reputation is indexed to spending power, then even selfhood becomes a kind of showroom, and "good repute" is less an honor than a price tag.