Theses and Dissertations Collection

The Veblen Effect: Economics of a Childhood is a collage memoir comprised of micro-essays. The project is designed to create meaning out of compilation and juxtaposition. Weaving together three topical threads—memory-based vignettes, objective timelines, and exploration and analysis of economic theories and thinkers—the manuscript works to arrive at meaning in a style that is organic to the personal journey behind the subject matter: reaching, contemplating, and never perfectly clear or clean. Using her own life-line as a yardstick, the narrator tracks over twenty years of her rural South Dakota hometown’s development and downfall, the suspected criminal activity of a large dairy corporation, and her own family’s place and association in both.

Throughout the manuscript, the author utilizes memory, analysis of economic theory and the work of economist and capitalism critic Thorstein Veblen, investigative journalism, and self-study in an attempt to illustrate that there is a meaning, a cause, behind seemingly destined and senseless situations. By susing out details in small pieces as single moments, thoughts, and stories that fall into one another like a jigsaw puzzle, the narrator creates a sensation of building to a critical mass reflective of her own slow discovery of the true significance of her life’s most remembered and haunting moments. The resulting image is one of a system of greed that has set up everyone in this town to fail.