Who is Thorstein Veblen from The Worldly Philosophers and what is their importance?

American academic, Thorstein Veblen, investigated economic man and the economic system. He was born in 1857 to a Minnesota farmer and was educated at Carleton College in Minnesota, where he eventually married the college president's daughter. Venlen earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1884 and worked for Lawrence Laughlin at Cornell before accompanying him to the University of Chicago. He published four books during his lifetime, these include The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Engineers and the Price System and Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise.