In this study originally planned as an introduction to a new edition of Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System , Gould reviews the reasoning underlying Veblen's anticipation of continuing and irreconciable conflict between entrepreneurs and engineers. "Gould demonstrates ...that [as] technicians are ... becoming the entrepreneurs and captains of industry ... the Veblenian conflict is being reconciled." The American Economic Review "The many statistics ... some of them previously unpublished, enhance its considerable value." Library Journal
Written in the 1960s... badly accesses the prospects of a technical elite commandeering the technical apparatus away from the technically illiterate monied interests from a Veblenian prospective... no appreciation of managerial pseudoscience and didn't foresee the corporate raiders of the 1980s reorienting values