The Engineers and the Price System

By

Thorstein Veblen

1921

Viking Press. New York, NY.

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Publishers' Note

The following series of papers is reprinted from the Dial, where they appeared from time to time during 1919, in the months immediately following the Armistice. Since then American industry has undergone a period of unprecedented prosperity, which has in its turn been followed by a period of depression even more aggravated than the one the author had before his eyes at the time of writing. The effect has therefore been as if no substantial change had taken place in the state of industry, of such a character as to make this discussion less pertinent now than it was at the time it was first printed. Indeed, the contrary is the case, not only because the difficulties inherent in our industrial practice have since come into fuller bearing, but also because recent discussion has turned more and more persistently upon the constructive suggestions embodied particularly in the last essay, entitled "A Memorandum of a Practicable Soviet of Technicians." The fact that these suggestions were put forward as they here appear fourteen years ago removes them from the category of current "depression cures"; they indicated fundamental problems whose present seriousness was predictable to at least one thinker who did not subscribe to the truths of conventional economics.

January, 1933.