ABSTRACT
Thorstein Veblen was reared in Scandinavian Lutheran communities in the upper Midwest. He was the fourth son of Norwegian immigrant farmers who sent their children to Carleton College in Minnesota. There he received training in economics under the tutelage of John Bates Clark, who later became a prominent neoclassical economist. After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Carleton, Veblen taught for a year and then enrolled at Johns Hopkins for graduate study, where he was a student of C.S.Peirce and Richard Ely. After a short stay he moved to Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy and economics in 1884, while studying under such noted academicians as Noah Porter and William Graham Sumner. He was then idle for seven years, much of which was spent living with relatives or in-laws in the Midwest. Veblen’s agnosticism made him unemployable in schools with religious affiliations and he had not yet established a reputation in economics.
