A couple of weeks ago I posted a few pages from the 1935 book ‘Housewives And Downing Street' which provided one possible explanation of the source of the so-called household analogy that plagues debate on the national economy.
Now Ian Tresman, a regular commentator on this site has uploaded a whole copy of the book to the web archive.org site. This is free to access, so you can read a copy yourself.
Enjoy! And thanks Ian.
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I appreciate that, I really do, but could we also organise a symbolic book burning instead – even if it’s just a photocopy?!
Housewives and Downing Street is a symptom but not the underlying pathology here.
The argument of the book is an example of the use of the conceptual metaphor of the nation as a family, and more specifically the national budget as the household budget within the frame of the conservative moral hierarchy.
Conceptual metaphor is a big area of study within philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. George Lakoff has written extensively on the moral implications of how conceptual metaphor frames the way we understand narratives, in his books “Metaphors We Live By” and “Moral Politics” among others.
There has been some work done directly on the metaphors that could be used to progressively frame and understand MMT, and I found this paper by Connors and Mitchell:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01603477.2016.1262746
They suggest the primary metaphor should be purposes as destinations from which we can also get purposes as desired objects.
Thanks
That paper is useful – I had read it before
Lakoff’s work on ‘framing’ is worth everybody’s time to understand. It is very helpful in understanding how the Right has set the narratives on tax and health to take but two examples. Tax as being about governments taking and spending OUR money, and publicly provided health as an interference in our personal lives. The Left and Centre have been very poor in countering the narratives and end up just arguing on the Right’s ground, using their language.
Im simplifying a lot – and maybe badly. This article is a good start.
https://medium.com/@ennuid/george-lakoffs-framing-101-7b88e9c91dac
Thanks
Pilgrim
you are a bit of a firebrand
Better that than shrugging the shoulders like so many do
Shaw’s great quote about all progress depending on unreasonable men (and women).
There’s a few of them here!
True
Bill Mitchell’s presentation “Training the MMT Trainers” (2019) is also quite good. Scroll down to the section “Events from September 2019” where there is a link to a PowerPoint in PDF format. https://gimms.org.uk/tools-and-resources/
Page 41 Module 3: Framing and Language, is where it all starts.