![]() And his critiques of the economics of his day were apparently devastating in their time and are still a snarky good read. And there is still much painful truth today in The Higher Learning clearly evident to anyone who knows anything about University fund raising. A lot of The Theory of the Leisure Class still applies wonderfully, and explains far too much to be comfortable about Western Civilization's fetishization of both wealth and property, both then and now. ![]() So, if he was a poor prophet and a poor ancient historian and apparently lacked any deep knowledge of any culture other than his own, why read Thorstein Veblen today? Because he was a clear-sighted (if not unbiased), merciless, extremely well-read and witty observer of his times and culture. He was a poor prophet (very little of what he predicts has come to pass), and is attempts to delve into the past are little more than "just so" stories (even he admits at one point in The Theory of the Leisure Class that "The evidence for the hypothesis that there has been such a peaceable state of primitive culture is in great part drawn from psychology rather than from ethnology", not that the ethnology of the time when he wrote that sentence was all that reliable or unbiased). He seems to lack any but the most superficial knowledge of any culture but that of Western Europe, and what he had was has gained by reading secondary and tertiary sources (in fact he appears to make very limited use of primary sources at all). ![]() His essay on The Technicians and Revolution is risible to anyone who has spent much time around actual engineers, and his essay on The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe shows an equal lack of experience (or experience overridden by expectations) with actual European Jewish culture. Veblen's view on race seem peculiar in this day and age, and although he made a real effort at understanding Darwin and Mendel and applying them scientifically, he appears to have been undermined by his day and age's views on race, both overestimating the genetic variability within groups and overestimating that within the entire human species. However, 68+ years later this is a largely unsupportable view. In 2023, Dorie Chevlen repeated that process while testing the new version of the Nemo Victory Blanket.The Editor's Introduction to the 1948 edition of The Portable Veblen (not to be confused with the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Mckenzie) talks about how well Veblen (who had died in 1929) had worn, how little it was dated. Thankfully for us and the comfort of our afternoon, none of the blankets we tested let any moisture through their layers of fabric. We also poured water on the underside of each blanket to see if it would leak through to the surface. For the 2020 update of this guide, which Dorie Chevlen wrote, we tested blankets by having two adults sit on them atop grass for one hour. We then put a 45-pound plate weight on each blanket and inspected the weighted spot after 20 minutes for dampness. For an earlier version of this guide, which Kit Dillon wrote, we placed all the blankets on a recently watered lawn in the shade and lay on each one for roughly 10 minutes. Most blankets without some kind of barrier will pull moisture up from the ground like a sponge, especially if you’re lying on them for a few hours (and every good picnic should last at least that long), so we tested only those blankets claiming to have water-resistant or waterproof backing materials.
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