The Rhetoric of the Right

Language Change and the Spread of the Market

David George

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136245084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

This study seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which changes in the language associated with economic issues are reflective of a gradual but quantifiable conservative ideological shift.

In this rigorous analysis, David George uses as his data a century of word usage within The New York Times, starting in 1900. It is not always obvious how the changes identified necessarily reflect a stronger prejudice toward laissez-faire free market capitalism, and so much of the book seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which the changing language indeed carries with it a political message. This analysis is made through exploration of five major areas of focus: "economics rhetoric" scholarship and the growing "behavioral economics" school of thought; the discourse of government and taxation; the changing meaning of "competition, " and "competitive"; changing attitudes toward labor; and the celebration of growth relative to the decline in attention to economic justice and social equality.

1
Introduction

In this project, I will be taking two directions that differ from what is usually called behavioral economics. This now flourishing field has managed to reduce in status the armchair theorists who have been in charge of economics – continual challenges notwithstanding – since at least the time of Adam Smith. Armchair theorists like to talk, setting forth assumptions and deriving conclusions very much in the deductive tradition. Behaviors are assumed rather than observed, at least in the simplified characterization of such theorists.

Behavioral economics constitutes one more step in a long history of challenging this and introducing a more scientific, inductive tradition to economics. “Observe how people actually behave and only then put together theories,” runs the message. Facts must be gathered before theories are formulated, not merely assumed in a way that makes theorizing tractable.

I will not be contesting the overall importance of this very skeletal description of behavioral economics, but the starting point of my work will be two weaknesses that limit what its overall project has been taken to be. As a first weakness, talk should not be an activity exclusively associated with the armchair theorists. Yes, these theorists too often simply create a reality through words (“assume that people are perfectly rational”). But talk is also a behavior and as such must be more a part of behavioral economics. In what follows it will be words that receive attention and the change in word usage over time.

As a second weakness, to argue that armchair theorists have fallen short in their understanding and portrayal of reality should not be treated as evidence that they have failed to influence that reality. People may behave differently than theory assumes, but what if with the passage of time their behaviors are influenced by that theory?¹

Focus on rhetoric

An interest in how economists communicate with each other is usually assumed to have taken off with the publication in 1985 of Donald McCloskey’s book, The Rhetoric of Economics. While this project has taken a good number of twists and turns, its usual focus has remained internal to economics. The starting point was dissatisfaction with the modernist vision of economics as a social science, and a desire to demonstrate that the sheer art of persuasion exerts influence far more often than the advocates of mathematical models and statistical analyses are willing to admit.

The importance of this project should not be underestimated. The heterodox movement to break free of the neoclassical methodology and focus is deeply engrained with many of the post-modern ways of thinking that began with McCloskey and whether they succeed or not in upsetting the still dominant orthodoxy, there is no doubt that their influence has been and will continue to be significant.²

I start with this appreciation of a vital movement to give credit where credit is due but to also announce that my motive for writing this book and the sort of questions I raise will represent a break from the rhetorical movement as it is generally understood. Only on a few occasions in the chapters that follow will I be studying the language of economists, and even when I do, it will be economists writing for the introductory student, not economists writing for each other, that will be the focus. What inspired this project was a long-festering, hard to pinpoint irritation with the economic language of the non-economist. During the long-running move to the right economically that just happens to coincide with my professional career as an economics teacher, I have frequently found myself paying attention to words and phrases that bothered me, often not quite sure as to why they did so, and often unable to imagine what used to be said in place of these words and phrases.

To give some examples of the questions that arose, what was the cause and the path by which competitive came to be encountered so frequently and came to be an unequivocally good thing? Has it always been true, as it currently appears to be, that the act of politicizing is disreputable? Has the act of commercializing changed in its acceptability? It was not hard to recall when one would never give someone advice to sell yourself or market yourself and yet just such advice seemed to be increasingly common. Was this so? And what about earnings? On tax forms in the United States, earnings signify returns to labor, not returns to property. Yet unless I was imagining things, it seemed to be increasingly associated with profits. As recently as the 1970s, entrepreneur was a pretentious name for a business owner and was used mainly in the writings of economists. Has there been an increased usage of this word in the general society? And as a final example, I felt certain that saying one would create jobs was an expression rising in popularity. If this were so, what might have been said previously instead of this?

The main source for data to try to answer questions such as these will be the New York Times Historical Newspapers data base. Data for the Times itself extends back to 1850, but, except for a few exceptions, my focus will be limited to years since 1900. Sometimes word counts will appear by decade, but more often I will divide data into three periods: pre-Great Depression (1900–1929), pre-Ronald Reagan (1930–1979), and post-Ronald Reagan (1980–present). When trends are uncovered, corroboration will be sought by comparing similar early 20th century word usage (1900–1922) as revealed by the America’s Historical Newspapers database (hereafter abbreviated AHN) with more recent word usage (since 1980) as revealed by the newspapers included in the ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851–2008) database (hereafter ProQuest).³ The data sources describe populations rather than samples and for this reason no traditional significance tests will be applied. My general modus operandi will be to simply show the trends in relative usage over time by noting the ratio changes of one particular word or phrase to another.

The trends that I will uncover will, I believe, be surprising inasmuch as the New York Times has been, and continues to be, the bastion of liberal economic perspectives, though great care must be taken in drawing conclusions. These trends will with few exceptions reflect the general rightward shift of the nation over at least the last forty years. But to the extent that the language change is accounted for by changes in the languages of others being quoted or paraphrased, these changes may not reflect any shifts in the thinking of Times reporters themselves.

And this raises the question of what the change in language can tell us about the intentions of those who adopt these changes. There is one tradition, well represented by the work of Geoffrey Nunberg (2006), that approaches changes as deliberate strategies. Self-awareness of the words one chooses has spread over the last century from being the special preserve of the literary set to being something which advertisers can ignore only at their own peril. That conservatives have very deliberately introduced words and phrases with very specific intents is undeniable.

But as surely as an injection of spending into a depressed economy can have ripple effects that add to the initial deliberate stimulative action, deliberate change in language, while having its own immediate effects, can change the language of those not sharing the views of those who precipitated the changes. To take just one example that will receive more attention in a later chapter, nearly everyone today uses politicize in a negative sense not originally intended by those who appear to have first used the word during the activist 1960s. In short, a change in the language exerts an impact by affecting what we all hear (as spoken by the originators of the change) but can exert at least an equal effect by changing the language of those sharing none of the beliefs of the originators of the change.

Added to this, there is a type of language change that will be explored that is likely to be no one’s conscious intent. The clearest example of this in the chapters ahead is the propensity to use our instead of the when something begins to hold greater appeal and to do the reverse when something falls out of favor. Here, far more often than not, the speakers are wholly unaware of their changes. While not a deliberate action of anyone, it can serve as a useful indicator of attitudinal change.

The chapters ahead

We know instinctively that the old saying “it’s impossible to be too thin or too rich” is deliberately simplistic and not quite true. This comes through poignantly with the rising incidence of eating disorders in recent years that glorify thinness to the point of near starvation. It may be less obvious when it comes to wealth, but at least from an economist’s standpoint, it is possible to have too much of everything, with wealth being no exception. In the chapter that follows it is the language associated with government’s role in the economy that will receive attention. The United States has since its inception been more suspicious of government than most other advanced capitalist nations of the world. But even acknowledging the near inborn disposition of Americans to question anything that government touches, the fact does remain that the cynicism and distrust continue to grow. In this chapter, century long rhetorical trends will be studied. Why is our government ever less likely to be called ours? Since when is it always seen as wrong to politicize? Why does a quarter-century shrinkage of government not translate into a fading away of references to big government?

As government fades in status, the market’s reputation rises. Chapter 3 examines the spreading love affair with competition. Why does it appear ever more frequently compared with monopoly even while industrial concentration increases? And why does competition grow in usage relative to cooperation, when most would agree that the latter of these is not as plentiful as it ought to be.

At the level of the individual, the market’s replacement of government is paralleled by the consumer’s replacement of the voter-citizen. In Chapter 4 it is the steadily ascendant consumer that will be the focus of analysis. Most of us are aware that the consumer has snuck in to conversations where clients or students or citizens once prevailed. The greater acceptance of advertising and marketing has, not surprisingly, coincided with the embrace of the consumer. While advertising to clients or students may raise ethical red flags, advertising to consumers is as natural as tending to the sick. The different ways in which consumerism has affected the language will be the focus of this chapter.

While consumers need spending power, it is no secret that that the source of most spending power, salaries and wages, have fared poorly for many years now, at least for the lower earning 80 percent of wage earners. In Chapter 5, it is the language associated with labor that will be investigated. That a loss in power and influence might lie behind the wage trends is fairly clear, but we should not underestimate the role that language has played in diminishing the status of workers, and not just reflecting but contributing to this ongoing event. Why are wages more frequently referred to as costs and less frequently referred to as earnings than they used to be? Why is it that employers create jobs instead of providing employment, as they once did? And why do we treat firms that demand labor as the ones creating or providing jobs instead of describing the suppliers of labor this way. Don’t we, after all, treat the suppliers of goods, not demanders, as the creators of these goods?

Chapter 6 examines economic growth, the dynamic process that stands today as the sine qua non for anything worth calling “good times.” What has happened to progress, equality, justice, and fairness? And is there significance to be found in the habit of speaking of academics and scientists as achievers while reserving the word successful for one doing well in the world of business? Also rather unconsidered has been the habit of making steadily more references to the virtues more equal opportunity while ever less references to more equal results. Might the much used metaphor of the level playing field have led us to assume that all participants – small proprietor and mega-corporation alike – can be expected to play the very same game rather than each having its own separate field on which to compete?

What nearly all of the trends in word usage seem to share is an increasingly relaxed reliance on that old bad guy – government – to intervene on the level playing field. To this we turn in the chapter that follows.

2
Markets over governments

The Libertarian juggernaut

When it comes to economic affairs the label conservative represents a libertarian (or classically liberal) position. Such a position is simple to describe and stands as testimony to the simplistic ideology that underlies it. In two words, the recommendation is less government. That this has been the recommendation of choice for Republican candidates in the United States is obvious. That it is a position that Democrats feel the need to reflexively support as well speaks volumes about the attractiveness of its simplicity. No matter how it is measured, the economic role of government has not been growing in the United States for a very long time. Federal government outlays as a percentage of GDP have varied little for an entire half-century. In 1962, they comprised 18.8 percent of all outlays, rose to a high of 23.5 percent during President Reagan’s third year in office – 1983 – and generally fell through 2007, when they comprised 20.0 percent of all outlays.¹ While state and local spending has risen slightly in response to the lack of relative growth in government spending, the fact remains that by almost any way of looking at the matter, government outlays ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Markets over governments
• 3 Competition over cooperation and monopoly
• 4 Consumers over citizens
• 5 Management over labor
• 6 Growth over progress, justice, and equality
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index