Languages of Economic Crises

Sonya Marie Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Teoría económica

This book offers a critical engagement with languages that describe, perpetuate, respond to, and resist economic crises. Unlike many volumes on economic crises that offer economistic explanations of their causes or policy suggestions for their resolution, this collection explores the different types of language used to deal with complex economic phenomena. The chapters in this volume examine a range of connections between language and crises: from the metaphors used historically to describe economic crises, to the languages deployed within periods of crises and economic struggle, to the popular responses thereto (including political manifestations and worker-organized enterprises). Also considered are the implications for democratic participation and gender relations, and the lack of language to express economic experience amongst certain groups.

With essays from seven contributors representing five different countries, this collection has global relevance in a time marked by economic volatility and upheaval, and will serve as a valuable resource for those interested in the politics of language, economic discourse and the epistemological complexities of economic crises.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

The metaphors of crises

Daniele Besomi

ABSTRACT

Metaphors, analogies, and other figures of speech are ubiquitous, and far from being mere ornaments they have heuristic, illustrative, analytical, methodological, or epistemological roles in scientific discourse. The present paper offers the prolegomena to a metaphorology of economic crises and business cycles, from the perspective of an historian of economic thought.

The paper traces a general historical outline of the usage of metaphors applied to these phenomena, and offers a characterization of the metaphorical transfer of features from the source domain to the target domain. It shows, by referring to storm and pendulum metaphors, how the selective transfer to crises and cycles of some properties rather than others contributes to define different, even incompatible, interpretation of the role of these phenomena in the working of the economic system. The study of the actual usage of metaphors (as opposed to a cataloguing of source domains supposed to provide a unique view of the target) is therefore important to throw light the tacit presuppositions on which the understanding of crises is based.

In 1844, discussing National distress: its causes and remedies, Samuel Laing described ‘the alternations of hot and cold fits of commercial depression and excitement, to which the country has been, for many years past, periodically subject’ (Laing 1844, p. vi). He was not talking of simple accidental oscillations in the state of trade, but in using the terminology associated at the time with recurrent fevers (such as malaria), he stressed at once their gravity, violence, the approximate regularity in their reappearing, and their being constituent parts of the same phenomenon.

Similar characterizations of economic crises and their features by means of metaphors were quite common in the nineteenth century. It was in the early 1800s that crises first appeared in their modern form and triggered the early discussions on their nature. The usage of such figures of speech, however, is still common in the literature, both professional and (more frequently) addressed to the broader public. Far from being a mere textual embellishment, metaphors and other figures of speech have been long since recognized as important components of scientific discourse, where they are applied with different purposes – be it pedagogical (they convey meaning by explaining something new by means of something with which the reader is more familiar), heuristic (by understanding an object by means of a comparison with another, or the transference of a selected set of properties from an object to another), rhetorical (by persuading the reader by reference to a better established science), analytical (by modeling an object in terms of another), or epistemological (by transferring to one process the kind of explanations governing another one). To take up Hoffman’s conveniently concise list, scientific metaphors have been shown to serve a remarkable variety of functions:

(1) To suggest new hypotheses, hypothetical concepts, entities, relations, events, or observation terms,

(2) To predict and describe new phenomena or cause-effect relations,

(3) To give meaning to new theoretical concepts for unobservable or unobserved events,

(4) To suggest new laws or principles,

(5) To suggest new models [or] refinements of old ones,

(6) To suggest new research methods or ideas for experiments or hypothesis tests,

(7) To suggest choices between alternative hypotheses or theories, often a choice between more and less fruitful metaphors,

(8) To suggest new methods for analyzing data,

(9) To contrast theories or theoretical approaches,

(10) To provide scientific explanations in the form of metaphoric redescriptions,

(11) To suggest alterations or refinements in a theory,

(12) To suggest new theories, theoretical systems, or worldviews. In a sense, metaphors, images, and models are embryonic theories in that they can lead to the generation of mathematical or other formalisms which other theorists then can use, perhaps without explicit reference to the initial images or models. (Hoffman 1985, pp. 332–333)

Metaphors (let me, for the sake of brevity, use this term, when unambiguous, to encompass all forms of transfers from one domain to another via figures of speech¹) are thus frequently powerful ingredients of the cognitive process, be it in the phase of its creation or its transmission. As is forcefully stressed by metaphor scholars in various disciplines (from philosophy of science to linguistics), in most if not all fields of knowledge, metaphors enter at a very deep level in the understanding of problems and their subsequent conceptualization. For this reason the analysis of metaphors enables researchers to disclose the most fundamental principles of scientific theories. The metaphor is not only conducive to concept formation, but provides the guiding thread to the interpretation of the world (Blumenberg 1997, p. 88).

This paper introduces an ongoing research project aiming at examining whether and how metaphors can help characterize basic understanding of crises and their place in the working of the economic system, with particular emphasis on the theories developed in the nineteenth century. The rationale of this inquiry is that during most of the 1800s theories of crises were formulated by laypeople rather than by professional economists,² in natural language, with a conceptual apparatus often lacking precision. In these conditions, the usage of metaphors can reveal the underlying premises and interpretative framework on which specific theoretical approaches are built, thereby enabling one to answer the questions, ‘What are crises and business cycles?’ and ‘What role do they play in the unfolding of the economic system’s dynamics?’. In the twentieth century, with the formalization of economics and business cycle theories, the usage of figurative language has not disappeared, although metaphors and similes have become rarer in the technical literature while more elaborate analogies have appeared, used to detail the specific working of a mechanism or to provide the formalism for economic models of business cycles. Metaphors remain a powerful heuristic tool in contemporary discoursive texts on crises. In the recent literature on crises, the usage of metaphorical transfers also enables the reader to bring to light the assumptions and points of view hidden behind the technicalities of models.

The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I outline the usage of metaphor through the course of time, in both the general and professional literatures. In the second section, I briefly discuss how the metaphorical transfer is structured, placing the emphasis on the features of the source domain that are selectively assigned to the target domain, showing how a phenomenon can be characterized by means of different metaphors and, conversely, how the same trope can convey different meanings depending on the properties that are attributed to the phenomenon to be explained. In the two sections after that, I provide examples of this multiple significance derived from a single image by discussing how two metaphors widely used in the literature on crises and business cycles were each used to support, or even to construct, the multiple distinct interpretations of the phenomenon that have emerged in the history of this subject in economics. Subsequently (in the fifth section), I briefly place these contrasting interpretation of the phenomenon in the light of the developments of the theories of crises and cycles. Finally, I draw some conclusions.

Timeline of metaphorical usage

One might expect that as economics becomes more and more formalized, the presence of metaphors in the literature would dwindle. One can try to evaluate the evolution of the usage of certain metaphors in time in the general literature by means of Ngrams, by Google Labs (http://books.google.com/ngrams), an instrument that depicts graphically the relative frequency in time of the occurrence of selected strings of words in a sample amounting to about the 4% of the books in the Google books collection. The search box only allows for a limited number of characters, which permit one to simultaneously illustrate the frequency of usage of twelve relatively common metaphorical expressions in connection with crises. The normalized frequency of occurrence of the expressions ‘wave of depression’, ‘speculative fever’, ‘casino economy’, ‘financial contagion’, ‘economic disease’, ‘financial madness’, ‘fever of speculation’, ‘financial storm’, ‘vortex of ruin’, ‘commercial earthquake’, ‘financial meltdown’, and ‘financial explosion’ in the corpus of English language³, from 1800 (when these expression begin to become significant) to 2008, the last year included in the sample, can be seen at https://goo.gl/MfA7oe.⁴ The Ngram shows that some metaphors were only used in the early stages of the debate on crises (as for instance ‘vortex of ruin’, scarcely used after 1890), others emerged at a later date (e.g. ‘financial meltdown’, ‘casino economy’ and ‘financial contagion’), others are found throughout most of the period in consideration (‘financial storm’, ‘fever of speculation’), others only occur at some points (‘commercial earthquake’, ‘financial madness’ or ‘financial explosion’).

One can also depict the overall usage of these metaphors (http://goo.gl/pRvZuc), by adding together the normalized frequencies of the same set of metaphorical expressions to give a clear idea of their development in time. The graph shows that these metaphors for crises started appearing when crises became a frequently discussed subject, after the panic of 1825. Their usage steadily increased till the peak in the 1930s, then decreased till the mid-1990s, to increase again sharply with the financial crises at the turn of the century. The financial crisis of 2007–08 is not captured by these data. This does not contradict the conjecture that the formalization of economics was accompanied by a less frequent usage of metaphors (these metaphors, at least), but does not provide full evidence either. At the end of the millennium, with the return of financial crises culminated i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: language and crisis in the time of the pandemic
• Introduction: languages of economic crises – narrating, resisting, speaking otherwise
• 1 The metaphors of crises
• 2 Vultures, debt and desire: the vulture metaphor and Argentina’s sovereign debt crisis
• 3 Confronting Spain’s crises: from the language of the plazas to the rise of Podemos
• 4 Recuperating and (re)learning the language of autogestión in Argentina’s empresas recuperadas worker cooperatives
• 5 Making sense of precarity: talking about economic insecurity with millennials in Canada
• 6 Language, gender and crisis: an interview with Katherine Gibson
• Index