In 2012 a conference was held on Thorstein Veblen in Istanbul. It was sponsored by a socialist labor union, the Chamber of Electrical Engineers. We were asked why not focus on Marx. My answer was that Marx had died a generation earlier, and the major critique of finance capitalism had passed to Veblen. This book (from which my following remarks are excerpted) is a series of essays, including by myself and another NC friend, Michael Perelman. The Return of the Repressed Critique of Rentiers: Veblen in the 21st century Rentier Capitalism Michael Hudson Edited excerpt from Michael Hudson and Ahmet Oncu, eds., Absentee Ownership and its Discontents: Critical Essays on the legacy of Thorstein Veblen (ISLET 2016, $35). Simon Patten recalled in 1912 that his generation of American economists – most of whom studied ...