Analysis Of Thorstein Veblen's The Country Town

In his book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America [1923] (1964), Thorstein Veblen is seeking, in the chapter “The Country Town,” to construct a portrait of the eponymous institution believing it to be integral to understanding the overarching economic system of the United States. In general, Veblen (1964, 142) states that the creation of the country town owes its genesis to real-estate speculation; furthermore, it is driven by a desire for continues and unchecked growth of valuation and profit. In this endeavor, according to Veblen (1964, 142-145), the citizens of these small towns are engaged in a sort of symbiotic relationship, of sorts, citizens attempting to increase their land’s value and business

Indeed, it seems that that country town is swimming in this relation. Noting that the original traders or merchants that existed in country towns prior to the growth of the speculative model were more engaged in an act of self-determination, Veblen (1964, 153) appears to lament their disappearance as Big Business has cut into their earnings through lending and other practices. Ultimately the increase in power of these larger financial institutions, along with the growing desire of the citizens to increase their own landed wealth, which is perhaps illusory and based on speculation, leads to the death of this merchant adventurer Veblen

As a result, these small communities could, at their best, seem based solely on a desire to profit and leave rather than community at their best and, at their worst, be seen as infected buboes being fed by the arteries and diseased heart of a much more maligned system. Veblen himself does not make these distinctions, but rather attempts to present the country town for what it is, rather than what it could or should be. Indeed, the picture that Veblen (1964, 154) paints of the flow of income in the country town – from bankers, to merchants, to farmers – is a familiar microcosm of how the economy writ large appears to work. Of course, it could be assumed that, due to its aforementioned birth in subsistence farming and the presence of the now defunct independent merchant, that the country town was once different. Veblen (1964, 154) refers to this state of things as the “masterless country town,” conjuring a very American image of manifest destiny and the like; however, change is constant and Veblen posits that the country town has morphed into something more aligned with the desires of Big Business than that of its