Thirty years later, during which time the academic establishment of the US slowly accepted the socioeconomic facts reported in "The Theory of the Leisure Class", Veblen was vindicated as a social scientist, by the two Middletown studies ("Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture" [1929] and "Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts" [1937]) which presented empirical evidence that working-class families practiced conspicuous consumption and did without necessities (adequate food and clothing, etc.)