Absentee Ownership is an inquiry into the economic situation as it has taken shape in the twentieth century, particularly as exemplified in the case of America. According to Thorstein Veblen, absentee ownership is the main and immediate controlling interest in the life of civilized men. It is the paramount issue between the civilized nations, and guides the conduct of their affairs at home and abroad. World War I, says Veblen, arose out of a conflict of absentee interests and the peace was negotiated with a view to stabilize them. Part I of the book is occupied with a summary description of that range of economic circumstances and that sequence of economic growth and change that led up through the nineteenth century and have come to a head in the twentieth century. Part II is an objective, theoretical analysis of those economic circumstances described in the first part of the book. Marion Levy writes in his introduction about the phrase "absentee ownership" and how it has a definite connotation, representing a dark figure in the economic system, a frustration of desired levels of self-sufficiency. In the early days, the giants of business enterprise had faces--Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, Edison--but they all turned into faceless bureaucracies, says Levy. The giants may not have been nice, but they had faces and human traits. Absentee ownership wiped that out for the common man. Veblen's book continues to be of vital importance to the studies of economics, political theory, and sociology.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

In his latest book, scholar-historian Murray G. Murphey exhaustively explores the life and theory of Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), whom, many scholars agree, remains one of the leading social theorists of all time, if not also one of the more confounding. Murphey’s account begins with a brief economic history of nineteenth-century America, wherein he examines the conditions that formed Veblen’s ideology. With that understanding, the author studies Veblen’s personal history and brings to the fore his foundational ideas on human psychology, race, his theory of knowledge, and his analysis of social evolution. In the book’s later chapters, Murphey considers Veblen’s writing through the scope of his major volumes – The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Theory of Business Enterprise, and Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, among others. Spanning the latter stages of the nineteenth century into the first several decades of the twentieth century, Murphey traces Veblen’s radical economics and thinking within the broader context of America’s economic theory. In so doing, he upholds Veblen’s influence on the canons of economics and social science, and importantly, he attempts to resolve the lingering mystery behind one of America’s more puzzling and influential theorists.

Long viewed as a problem in other countries, the ownership of land and resources is becoming an issue of mounting concern in the United States. Nowhere has it surfaced more dramatically than in the southern Appalachians where the exploitation of timber and mineral resources has been recently aggravated by the ravages of strip-mining and flash floods. This landmark study of the mountain region documents for the first time the full scale and extent of the ownership and control of the region's land and resources and shows in a compelling, yet non-polemical fashion the relationship between this control and conditions affecting the lives of the region's people. Begun in 1978 and extending through 1980, this survey of land ownership is notable for the magnitude of its coverage. It embraces six states of the southern Appalachian region—Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama. From these states the research team selected 80 counties, and within those counties field workers documented the ownership of over 55,000 parcels of property, totaling over 20 million acres of land and mineral rights. The survey is equally significant for its systematic investigation of the relations between ownership and conditions within Appalachian communities. Researchers compiled data on 100 socioeconomic indicators and correlated these with the ownership of land and mineral rights. The findings of the survey form a generally dark picture of the region—local governments struggling to provide needed services on tax revenues that are at once inadequate and inequitable; economic development and diversification stifled; increasing loss of farmland, a traditional source of subsistence in the region. Most evident perhaps is the adverse effect upon housing resulting from corporate ownership and land speculation. Nor is the trend toward greater conglomerate ownership of energy resources, the expansion of absentee ownership into new areas, and the search for new mineral and energy sources encouraging. Who Owns Appalachia? will be an enduring resource for all those interested in this region and its problems. It is, moreover, both a model and a document for social and economic concerns likely to be of critical importance for the entire nation.

On the eve of his coming of age, a young Lord begins to see the truth of his parents' lives: his mother cannot buy her way into society no matter how hard he tries, and his father is being ruined by her continued attempts. The young Lord then travels to his home in Ireland, encountering adventure on the way, and discovers that the native residents are being exploited in his father's absence.