Regarding Veblen: I'm not sure the second 
sentence is a good characterization of his ideas. 
It emphasizes what Veblen saw as the destructive 
elements in man and society but ignores the 
constructive elements. In Veblen's writings the 
parental bent, the instinct of workmanship and 
the instinct of idle curiosity are used to 
account for the educational and cultural 
achievements of the past and are central to 
understanding technological progress. In Veblen's 
view, evolution is the interaction between 
constructive and destructive instincts (or propensities).

A possible alternative for the sentence might be:

As a founder of the institutional economics 
movement, he developed an evolutionary theory of 
cumulative economic change driven by the 
interaction between the human instincts of 
workmanship and predation. His writings include 
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he 
coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” 
The Engineers and the Price System (1921), and ...

Michael Nuwer