Conversations with Thorstein Veblen stages a series of sharp, unscripted debates between Veblen and a modern interlocutor, Dr. Zhi, over the questions that animated his work and still define ours: Why do people burn resources on display? Is status-seeking human nature or an artifact of pecuniary institutions? Can the drive Veblen called conspicuous consumption be formalized-or does formalizing it betray his critique? As the dialogues widen to draw in Adam Smith, Mill, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, Freud, and others, a single thread tightens: the collision between the rationality of provisioning and the rationality of display, and what that collision reveals about wealth, work, and the hierarchies we defend even when they exclude us. The final exchanges turn to the present-asking whether a technology capable of flattening cognitive hierarchies will be permitted to, or contained by the very people it would liberate. Rigorous, combative, and accessible, this is economic and social theory rendered as live argument rather than dead doctrine.
