The Engineers and the Price System

Abstract

The Engineers and the Price System is one of Veblen's few prophetic books. The book is squarely in the center of the preoccupation that has attended the rise of sociology since its beginnings in the nineteenth century: namely, the scanning of the historical skies for portents of "the new class" which will overturn the existing social order. The heart of Veblen's assessment of the revolutionary class is summed up in his identification of the "production engineers" as the indispensable "General Staff of the industrial system. There is much in The Engineers and the Price System that is surprisingly accurate and relevant to the present-day American economy. Veblen's proposal to do away with the price system reveals a naive notion of planning—akin to Marx's idea that the interest rate is merely an exploitative device, rather than an instrument to test the efficiency of capital, and has no place in a socialist economy.

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