‘I foresee that within the next ten or twenty years the now fashionable highly abstract analysis of conventional economists will lose out. Though its logical basis is weak – it is founded on utterly unrealistic, poorly scrutinised, and rarely even explicitly stated assumptions – its decline will be mainly an outcome of tremendous changes which, with crushing weight, are falling upon us’.

Mitchell's Veblenian institutionalism seems to boil down to substantially this: that men in the mass, at any given time and in any given culture-complex, behave in certain standardized ways, according to uniform but not simple patterns; these patterns undergo an evolutionary drift which can be roughly measured by the statistical device of time series and which with adequate empirical analysis is amenable to some degree of rational control and direction.