Veblen rambled a lot, so this book was a little hard to plod through. I thought it was brilliant when the topics were the switch from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, what a waste of time sports are, and the question of the whether or not higher learning is applicable to anything useful in life. Not so brilliant when the book touched on anything to do with race, ethnicity, or sex/gender. A lot of that didn't make any sense or was downright offensive.