Thorstein Bunde Veblen, an internationally recognized economist, was born one mile north of Valders on July 30, 1857. The sixth of twelve children of Norwegian immigrants Thomas Anderson Veblen and Kari Bunde Veblen, he spent his first seventeen years on farms there and in Minnesota, and those formative years of regimented daily toil fundamentally influenced his perspective throughout his career. After graduating from Carleton College in 1880, he entered Johns Hopkins University to study history and philosophy, soon left for Yale, and earned a PhD in philosophy in 1884, later continuing his studies in economics at Cornell University. He taught at several academic institutions, including the University of Chicago, Stanford University, The New School, and the University of Missouri. Unlike contemporaries such as John Bates Clark and Frank Knight, he saw economic organization as a human institution not subject to natural laws and asserted that economic behavior is shaped by institutions as well as by human biology and psychology. He was one of the first intellectuals to identify advertising, financial manipulation, and stagnation as essential features of a mature business economy, and his theories profoundly influenced the development of institutional economics. Between 1884 and 1925, he published ten books and fifty articles, many written during summers at his study cabin on Washington Island in Door County. Much of his writing examined the relationship between consumption and wealth in society, and in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) he introduced the concept of conspicuous consumption, purchasing goods or services to publicly display wealth rather than to meet basic needs. After retiring to California, he died in Menlo Park on August 3, 1929, and his theories remain integral to understanding modern consumer behavior.