Ways in Which Language Shapes Our Understanding of Money and the Economy - Essay Example

Ways in which language shapes our understanding of money and the economy Ways in which language shapes our understanding of money and the economy A connection exists between language and the way people think and behave our language also affect our economic decisions. Language can be categorized into two that is futured and futureless languages. Futured languages distinguish between the past, present and future, like English while futureless languages use the same phrasing to describe past events, current events and future events. There is a huge economic difference accompanied by this linguistic discrepancy. Over 30 percent of futureless language speakers are more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language individuals. When people speak about the future, they speak as if the future is more distinct from the past and feels distant. People get less motivated to save their money now in favor of the comfort of monetary value in future years (Holmes, 2009). Speaking a language that has no obligatory future markers such as Mandarin tend to stimulates people to accumulate more retirement assets. The national savings rates of a country are adversely affected by language. A country with smaller proportion of people speaking languages that does not have obligatory future markers tend to increases the rates of national savings. Evidence from research suggests that a person’s vernacular shapes the way he or she thinks about the various aspects of the real world, space and time. This has broad implications in the spheres of economics, politics and law (Reed 2009). Language structure affects our judgments and decisions concerning the future and this may have remarkable long-term consequences. From an economic point of view, people’s rates of savings are affected by various factors such as their income, age, education level, religious affiliation, their cultural values and their countries’ legal systems. Even though after all those factors were accounted for, language effect on the people’s savings rates turned out to be tremendous. Spoken language like English has obligatory future markers making people about 30 percent less likely to save money for the future use. People often counter certain economic policies as they disapprove on moral grounds of the assumptions on which they think the policies rest but not because they have been or would be economically hurt by such policies without even carefully calculating views about their economic worth (Reed 2009). There are over 7,000 languages spoken all over the world, which exhibit tremendous variance. Research has shown that language from verb tenses to gender to metaphors usually shapes the most elementary dimensions of human cognition (Howard, 2014). In economics, there are various metaphors used to describe inequality in economics. These metaphors actually have different consequences. We may use metaphors because issues like crime or the economy are hard to think about as they are complex systems that we’re talking about. Nobody can claim to have a complete understanding of these systems. Individuals end up drawing on knowledge of what is familiar to them. Consider the cases below where metaphors have been immensely deployed in economics. Economic wise, a word like “stalled” implies the need for a quick solution. Everybody knows what it means to jumpstart a car for example. When the same analogy is applied in economics, we’re implying that a very short term financial stimulus will aid in getting the economy going again. Conversely, when the economy is “ailing,” like a sick patient, it requires constant and long-term care. The difference between the two is crucial. In the textual analysis of Fox News’s leading opinion programs propagated during the Great Recession, Michael Kazin, who is a leading historian in America, argued that the ‘producer ethic’ has been the central element in populist conceptions of the folks. He stresses that producer populism is first and foremost a moral discourse, but one that has been particularly used by mass orators and political parties to critique or justify class hierarchies and the system of wealth distribution (Reed 2009). Producerism categorizes the society into two opposing camps, the ‘producers’ and ‘parasites.’ The two groups in Fox News programming are called the ‘makers’ and the ‘takers’. Here the government is seen to be captured and controlled an idle, aristocratic class that enriches itself by expropriating the producing class wealth. A just society is that in which resources are distributed on basis of labor contributed all wealth is a result of productive human labor. During the Great Recession, Fox programs repeatedly suggested that the financial collapse was the result of ‘undisciplined’ borrowers and Democratic policies aimed at increasing home ownership racial minorities and among low-income citizens (Holmes, 2009). However, contrary, Fox’s top hosts celebrated producers, among them the business elites repeatedly argued that business owners and the wealthy are the ones who shoulder the biggest tax burden and thus contribute the most to government and all that it provides for the entire population. Hosts in Fox News’s coverage across its leading programs equally referred to the rich as ‘job creators,’ a term which is very important as it was used on Fox to define businessmen as part of the laboring class. The term ‘rich’ sounded pejorative and could be replaced with ‘job creator’ and economically productive people by Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner (Howard, 2014). The concept of ‘job creator’ and its association with the rich, however, poses a set of problems for Fox News because having the ability to give or deny job positions is not so obviously productive work. In fact, the very term ‘working class’ is etymologically linked to its 19th-century predecessor, ‘the producing classes. Contrasting colonial American enterprise to aristocratic idleness in the Old World, Benjamin Franklin once called the U.S. the ‘land of labor’ and for hundreds of years the ‘hard worker’ has been considered the ideal civic subject. In contrast, wealth by birth has been looked down upon. Echoing these cultural values, Fox News programs constantly reiterate that the wealth of the worthy rich is the product of individual effort, not natal class or cronyism (Reed 2009). In another episode, a guest complains that by raising taxes is trying to punish people who are successful. This sounds like if you are successful, then you must have done it illegally rather than through hard work. As evident here, in Fox programs the term ‘successful’ is regularly used to describe the worthy rich. Unlike the term ‘rich,’ the term ‘successful’ treats affluence and market dominance as merited. The value of producers is determined by the market of which when translated this way, the privileged position of most elites is redefined as a product of the labor-value of their work. In Fox News’s social imaginary, all actors whose worth is defined by the market share solidarity as ‘workers’ and ‘producers.’ In this way, Fox News commentators emphatically argue that the wealthy are workers too. More, they are often framed as the hardest workers (Lanchester, 2014). According to Lucy Hooker, a BBC News business reporter and Chancellor George Osborne have discussed some seven best metaphors used in economy (Hooker, 2014) Saying red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global economy, which meant economy was in the blink, David Cameron reformulated an old classic that the economy was a broken down vehicle. All politicians who think they know everything and that the order of nature can be manipulated saying that a man can fix that (Holmes, 2009), loved this metaphor. The financial crisis triggered a tsunami of apocalyptic metaphors, many of them meteorological in nature. These ‘forces of nature’ are more useful for a chancellor to highlight the remote causes of the countrys economic plight where in 2011 George Osborne did indeed promise citizens they would ride out the storm, meaning a crisis. Time and tide don’t wait for adjustment of economic programme (Osborne, 2010). Journalists including, by his own admission Robert Peston are mostly favored by medical analogy of a ‘patient in a trolley’. Robert finds himself drawn to "anaemic recovery" and "economy on steroids" as a way helping us grip what is going on. US central bank chairman Ben Bernanke said credit was "the lifeblood of the economy". Hospital offers doses of bitter medicine, heart monitors, melodramatic life and death scenarios. If one cant feel a pulse, government intervention then is deemed to be justified (Holmes, 2009). George Osbornes Mansion House speech mentioned Winston Churchill’s phrases of ‘winning a battle’, as he is known to do before that they would not waver and the battle must be won. Warren Buffett, the western worlds most successful long term investor termed financial crisis as an economic Pearl Harbor and blaming the financial weapons of mass destruction. If people think they are engaged in a battle, they become preoccupied with competing and relative strength without seeing the ways they benefit from each other. Aggressively talking of things that are like war, usually contribute to an actual war according to Buffet (Osborne, 2010). Sporting metaphors are favored at the Bank of England, buoyed up perhaps by the success of London 2012.The chief economist of the bank Andrew Haldane liked spinning cricketing metaphor while deciding whether they play off the hook or in a defensive way over the rates of interests. His Canadian boss Mark Carney instead relies on a "trusty canoe" to "navigate the most rapid and treacherous waters" which suggests a more adrenaline fuelled approach to setting interest rate. Andrew though since then has predicted more of a long hard toil if to "win the economic marathon". The choice of metaphors uttered by central bankers is worth scrutinizing in order to read the meanings attached to them (Hooker, 2014). Mr. Thatcher used ‘housekeeper’s purse metaphor’ argued that any woman understanding the problems of running a home can as well understand the problems involved in running a country. Everyone can relate housekeeper’s purse metaphor to a bank overdraft where one cannot spend more than his/her earnings except that in these days there are multiple credit cards and four-times-salary mortgages which is lot less true than it used to be. Economists argued that a country running a deficit is similar to a household running one. Whichever way you slice a cake into pieces pie, there would rather be a bigger serving. However, pie metaphor for the economy is misleading and damaging according to Keith Hennessey who disliked it. A pie has a predefined size and some argue that the bigger pie new can and should simply be re-sliced to produce more equitable pieces. He added that there are individuals who do usually ignore that their actions would make the economy smaller (Osborne, 2010). Bernard Mandeville In the 18th century suggested a worker bee focusing on self-interest could lead to prosperity in the hive in "Fable of the Bees" metaphor that contained more than a hint of "greed is good". Interestingly, he was praised both by the father of modern right wing economic theory, Friedrich von Hayek, and John Maynard Keynes. However, these days, gardens and jungles are seen as a bit of a cop out and according to Phil Collins, a former speechwriter to Tony Blair who argued that metaphors from nature were always suspicious because the speaker is, in effect, saying not my fault, nothing I could have done. He added that the task of economic policy is to ensure that the economy is not a jungle at all (Hooker, 2014). Also, the language of finance and money really is sometimes vague, and does really hide the truth. An explanation about economic forces underlying the surface of reality is hard to hold on as it is surrounded by metaphors too. Taking an example of German bank and the economists’ analysis that the government bonds held by various countries neighboring Germany could gently be unwound. This implies that they run off meaning that the bank owns too much debt from euro-zone countries such as Spain, Greece and Ireland and would rather wait for the loan period of the debt to end than selling it off. The debt amount owned by the bank decreases gradually over time instead of shrinking after sell-off. Actually, letting them run off will gently unwound their holdings. What vexes language of money is “reversification”, where words take on an opposite meaning, or at least very different from their initial sense. Consider the term “hedge fund which began its life in economics as a term for setting limits on a bet whereby putting a hedge around a bet, clever gamblers restrict the size of their potential losses exactly similar to how a real hedge delimits the size of a field (Lanchester, 2014). Hedge fund, as it is used today means a lightly synchronized pool of private capital. A hedge is a physical thing that turned into a metaphor, into a technique, then the technique became more sophisticated and more complicated, then it turned into something that can’t be understood by the ordinary referents of ordinary language. This is the story of how a hedge, setting a limit to a field, became what it is today which is reversification in its full glory (Lanchester, 2014). So is “securitization.” An inherent guess would be that the word has something to do with security or reliability, or making things safer. Securitization involves of turning something into security, and in the world of finance it could be pretty much anything turned into a security, a financial instrument that can be traded as an asset. Car loans are securitized, mortgages are securitized, insurance payments are securitized and so is student debt. Securitization like any other financial maneuvers can be put to malign use. In the run-up to the credit crunch, certain kinds of loans began to be securitized on an industrial scale. Nowadays an institution lends money to a range of different borrowers. It then bundles the loans into securities, say, a pool of ten thousand mortgage loans, paying out an interest rate of six per cent, and selling these securities to other financial institutions. The institution lending the money no longer cares whether the borrower will be able to pay it back, the basic premise of banking—that money should only be lent to people who can repay it—has been undermined. To “bail out” means to slop water over the side of a boat. This verb has been reversified to mean an injection of public money into an institution that is failing. Other reversified verbs include; “Credit” that means debt, “Inflation” that means money being worth less, “Synergy” that means sacking people and “Risk” that means precise mathematical assessment of probability. “Noncore assets” means garbage. These examples show how the process of innovations, experimentation, and finance techniques has been brought to bear on language, so that words have lost their original meanings. However, this is not a process intended to deceive, but confines knowledge to a priesthood of people who can speak money (Lanchester. 2014). Brains of human beings and their language operate by using metaphors, which are the building blocks of how we think and communicate. Humans usually make sense of the world by seeing how parts relate and reflect in others. Metaphors are important as they structure not only how we see the world, but also our ability to see it and hence our ability to remake it. Making a choice of the right economic metaphor could be more important than you think. Chancellor George Osborne for example used the wrong metaphor to compare budget deficit to a credit card in a conservative conference by saying that the longer you leave it, the worse it gets. This was wrong since government finances are not like a credit card or a household budget. Countries are not individuals, as countries can last longer. The government of Britain is capable of printing its own money and raises its own taxes. An individual might feel good in the black, but in pure accounting terms, if a government is running a budget surplus, then it means businesses and households are in deficit, which is indeed bad news since it makes the sort of sense that a family could never justify itself. The analogy of Mr. Osborne is as off-beam as his conclusion that what Britain needs is savage spending cuts. If a metaphor is powerful, it wins political arguments, but a wrong metaphor distorts them (Osborne, 2010 ) Reference List Hooker, L. 2014. The seven best metaphors for the economy.retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30208476?ocid=socialflow_twitter Reed B (2009) Glenn Beck peddles populism for rich guys. Alternet: Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/news/143624/glenn_beck_peddles_populism_for_rich_guys/?page=entire Osborne. G. 2010. In praise of … the right metaphor. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/08/in-praise-of-metaphor-editorial Holmes. D. 2009. Economy of words. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01034.x/fullon Howard. N. 2014. The transforming power of metaphor. Retrieved from .https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/neil-howard/transforming-power-of-metaphor Lanchester. J. 2014. Money Talks.Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/money-talks-6?mbid=social_twitter Read More