Later, his student and colleague, Lewis Mumford, expanded some of Veblen's themes into a sweeping theory of power civilizations.Evgeny Morozov wrote in 2022 There are, indeed, many interesting ways to deploy Veblen’s analytical framework—his distinction between efficiency-oriented industry and pecuniary-oriented business, for example—to argue that what really drives capitalists is not profit-seeking, but, rather, the ability to engage in sabotage, to ensure that today’'s robber barons receive not only the profits they expect, but higher profits than their competitors.
In the past twenty years, a new approach to political economy known as Capital as Power (CasP), has emerged to do just that, introducing the concept of 'differential accumulation' to describe such dynamics.
[8]In a footnote, Morozov references both the book Capital as Power and a critical review of it from a Marxist point of view by Bue Rübner Hansen.
[9] According to the article devoted to "Capitalism as power" in the Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy (2022), by Tim de Muzio and Matt Dow,[10] the applicability of "absentee owner" to the capitalist derives from Veblen.
[14]David Troy Cochrane is a economist with the Canadian Labour Congress, whom Nitzan and Bichler credit with introducing the acronym CasP for "capital as power".
Nitzan and Bichler assign much more meaning to this formula than merely its quotidian operation as they claim that it forms "the central institution and key logic" of capitalist society[...][17]In a 2011 article Cochrane argued for a definition of capital as "quantified, vendible ownership claims over groupings of tangible and intangible assets that are expected to generate streams of earnings", as following from the ideas of Veblen and Cornelius Castoriadis.
[19][20] In a 2020 paper on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he discussed the reputational damage suffered by BP from the CasP point of view, in terms of a formulation "confidence in obedience" of power.
from 2013, Hager defended the worth of the CasP approach, against the description from industrial economics held to be central by the "monopoly school", that cornering the market was the aim.