The Engineers and the Price System Industrial Capitalism, Business Sabotage, and the Case for Technocratic Production

In The Engineers and the Price System, Thorstein Veblen advances one of his sharpest critiques of modern capitalism, contrasting the rational, productive logic of industrial technology with the pecuniary logic of business enterprise. Written in Veblen's characteristically ironic, analytic prose, the book belongs to the Progressive Era tradition of institutional economics and social criticism, arguing that the "price system" obstructs efficiency through sabotage, scarcity, and profit-seeking control. Veblen, the Norwegian-American economist and social theorist best known for The Theory of the Leisure Class, brought to this work a lifelong skepticism toward inherited privilege, conspicuous consumption, and the ceremonial habits of capitalist society. His academic marginality, wide learning, and attention to technological change helped shape his belief that engineers and technicians, rather than financiers, understood the true productive capacities of modern industry. This book is recommended for readers interested in political economy, the history of capitalism, technocracy, and critiques of corporate power. Though rooted in the industrial conflicts of the early twentieth century, its questions about expertise, ownership, and the social purpose of production remain strikingly contemporary.