I spend a lot of time thinking about metaphors. It may not sound like the work of an economist, but if you want to build a political economy that people can believe in, you have to. Because economics, and most especially political economy, is not mathematics, or physics, or even history. It is a story about how we live together, told in a language that only makes sense if the metaphors underpinning it feel true. And that is where the trouble begins, as the interpretation some put on yesterday's essay on Darwin showed.
The interpretation I discussed was not of what Darwin literally said, and I presumed that was clear. It was, instead, of the metaphor that Darwin created in the way that most people understand it. That, after all, is what the metaphor is. Then I interpreted the political economic interpretation of that commonly understood metaphor within neoliberal thinking that has embraced Darwin in its simplest form - suggesting, as a result, that there is greater return to the fittest, who are then equated with those who make the largest economic returns in society.
By doing so, neoliberal economics has produced from Darwin's thinking one of the mechanical metaphors that it has used to build narratives. Mainstream economics has, after all, been built on a series of metaphors so powerful that they have come to seem natural. The market is a “mechanism”. The economy is a “machine”. Money “flows” through it like oil through an engine. Prices “adjust” to achieve “equilibrium”, as if human beings were particles obeying physical laws. We even talk about “the invisible hand”, as though the economy were guided by a supernatural force that we must not question. Survival of the "fittest" slips very easily into such themes as justification in itself for the outcomes of market processes.
These metaphors have done more to shape our politics than any technical model ever has. They make us think that economies can be “overheated” or “cooled down” with fiscal and monetary “levers”. They make us believe that governments “run out” of money like households do. They give us comfort in pretending that complexity can be controlled by a few well-chosen dials in the Treasury or the Bank of England.
But the economy is not a machine. It is a living, breathing, messy system of relationships that is full of power, fear, hope, and contradiction. And when you build your political story on a mechanical metaphor, you remove the people from it. You make care invisible. You erase conflict. You make inequality sound like the natural outcome of efficiency rather than the consequence of design. And you make "fittest" the indicator of a reward system.
I have tried, and am still trying, to find better metaphors. In my quantum economics writing I have drawn on physics, on biology, and on systems theory, always looking for a way to describe the economy that captures its entanglement, its uncertainty, and its living nature. I talk about energy, about flow, and about feedback. But each of those metaphors has limits, too. Biology implies survival of the fittest. Physics can sound deterministic. Systems theory can seem abstract. Every metaphor seeks to illuminate one truth while taking the risk of hiding another.
The challenge is that political persuasion requires metaphor. Without it, you cannot communicate meaningfully. People do not live inside equations. They live inside stories. So I find myself in a constant tension: how to use metaphor to make the economy comprehensible without being captured by it; how to use it to open minds rather than close them.
That, to me, is the real work of political economy. It's not just describing how things are, but finding the language through which people can imagine how they might be different. To do that, we need metaphors that centre humanity, care, and interdependence. We need to talk about the economy as an ecosystem, and not as an engine; as a community, and not as a competition.
But that is hard. It takes effort to resist the mechanical metaphors that have been drilled into us since the first economics lesson we attended. It takes courage to tell stories that admit uncertainty, ambiguity and emotion. It means rebuilding the language of economics from the ground up, and doing so in ways that invite people in, rather than shutting them out.
That, in the end, is what I am trying to do on this blog. It is not just about the facts or the data. It is about reclaiming the story. Because whoever controls the metaphors controls the meaning, and whoever controls the meaning controls the politics. And I, for one, am not willing to leave that control in the hands of those who think an economy is just a machine to be fine-tuned, when it is, in truth, a society that we must learn to care for, which must have better songs to sing.
And if you want to know where the last line comes from, it's from this clip from the film Educating Rita:
Although not labelled as being in the quantum essays series, I think this post does fit into it. These are others in that series:
Other essays in this series:
- The Quantum Economics series (this link opens a tab with them all in it)
- The Quantum Essays: Observing and Engaging
- The Quantum Essays: Quantum MMT: The wave function of sovereign spending
- The Quantum Essays: Is equilibrium only possible in death?
- The Quantum essays: Economics, the Big Bang and Rachel Reeves
- The Quantum Essays: Quantum economics, discounting, and the cost of inaction
- The Quantum Essays: Schrödinger, entropy, equilibrium, and the lessons for society
- The Quantum Essays: The meaning of life, negentropy, and the politics of staying alive
- The Quantum Essays: Democracy as negentropy: why fascism is the politics of death
- The Quantum Essays: Where are the checks on entropy in the US system now?
- The Quantum Essays: Where are the checks on entropy in the UK system now?
- The Quantum Essays: The quantum difference between work and speculation
- Quantum(ish) Essay: What if Darwin was wrong? The case for the survival of the wisest
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If there is one thing that neoliberal classical economics is good at, it is coming up with catchy metaphors; but that doesn’t mean that they are economically good.
❌The National Debt — but it is not a debt.
❌Taxpayers’ money — it isn’t
❌The Free Market — only for the well-off
❌Government household budget — it isn’t
This has created a generation of pseudo-economists who think that they understand the economy, because they understand the metaphor.
The damage is immeasurable.
Thanks
I have struggled to engage with these essays. I understand the need to challenge the existing framing – and there are several grounds of people who are working on alternatives to neoliberal economics – but I just don’t see that it helps to substitute one set of misleading metaphors from physics or biology for another set. Others have found them thought provoking so perhaps that is enough.
First, if some find these essay helpful that is enough.
Second, no way of thinking or explanation works for anyone. Neurodiversity makes that clear. We should not even seek uniformity – because it is a false goal and prevents progress.
Third, what is failing in physics and biology? I am intrigued by your suggestion that we might be using misleading or false metaphors there.
Agree with the central thrust.
“It takes courage to tell stories that admit uncertainty, ambiguity and emotion. It means rebuilding the language of economics from the ground up, and doing so in ways that invite people in, rather than shutting them out.”
Economics is very heavy on maths, I suppose it gives comfort to economists that hope to develop some sort of deterministic ultimate model of economic reality. This has allowed them to pretend there is something of substance “behind the curtain” – but as Trajan et al discovered – there is nowt. So I agree, we need stories, narratives that have meaning to people & which can counter the nonesense. Unfortunately the nonesense has been going on for a long time, not helped (broken record starts) by journalists who for the most part are economically illiterate. In this area, I do not sense much change.
Question: following the end of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, did nobody ask/ponder on how the political economy would/could change given the emergence of fiat currencies & floating exchange rates. I ask because it seems that the Callahgan gov’ was utterly clueless.
Much to agree with
And economics went wildly wrong in the 70s by not asking the right questions.
Thought provoking stuff which stirred the more distant scientific half of my education back to life. I agree with the direction and destination of your argument but I was brought up on different vocabulary, and epigenetics wasn’t around in my day – but genetics has come a LONG way since Mendel was breeding peas.
You are 100% right about metaphors, and how powerful they are (household???).
I think more of “environmental niches” than systems. A niche can be a volcanic vent deep in the ocean, where some bacteria thrive in the boiling sulphurous brine, or a subterranean Antarctic lake where different organisms thrive. Cometh the niche, cometh the bug that can live there.
We have engineered an environmental micro- niche (Western neoliberal economies) where greedy selfish short-sighted people prosper, for a while, but it is within a larger system – a social niche called society, and a physical niche called the the planet Earth, in which the wider effects, inequality, resource depletion, pollution, of their activities causes widespread havoc, both socially and environmentally, leading eventually to a future where the most “fit” are going to be those super-hot bugs at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
As you point out, humans are equipped to do things differently. We can do more than hunt for a safe niche to survive in. We can do better than “adapt” to neoliberal economics by getting more selfish or violent in the hope that we will be the last to die rather than the first.
We can “create” something different, a niche where the politics of care can thrive, an electoral system where extreme ideologies are disadvantaged, a regulatory set of controls where the destructive supporters of greed find it HARD to prosper.
That niche and the society that thrives in it, is better suited to the larger niche of our planet, and may make our long-term survival more likely.
Of course I also believe it is more than simply a matter of choice. “I have set before you today, life and death.” (Deuteronomy 30.11-20) It is a moral imperative – to choose life, not just for ourselves, but for all, including “the least of these” (Matthew 25.31-46).
Thanks
“There must be a better song to sing”. Keep singing, please.
Metaphors are an essential part of storytelling and we live our lives by the stories we create and tell. They are incredibly powerful. This short video demonstrates how we can envision economics as the way we manage the planetary household instead of the myopic and simplistic way Rachel Reeves etc try to portray it. The household metaphor told in two very different ways. One is a pathway to nowhere (entropy) and the other acknowledges that we live on a planet abundant with life that must be front and centre of any sort of sustainable future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME-GfnaDFFI
Thanks
I love the way they take the “oikos nomos” household analogy away from the nation state, and apply it to the planet instead.
Nah!
No problem Richard with your metaphors because basically you are trying to use something that is real and known to society to explain something complex, difficult or to just debunk something just plain untrue. Call it on I say.
The deeper meaning for me that I have picked up is that many systems existing in sustaining life exist because they work and have created life or make something work. These systems seem inter-dependent and have reached some sort of stability. If there are losses they are contained. And even though there is a certain steady state in nature, it still can be punctuated by disasters or rapid changes in things. These things ‘just happen’. Chance; in a huge universe whose size is beyond our comprehension.
The real pig in the poke is mankind. I have learnt that in man made systems, things just ‘don’t happen’. There is no cosmic source behind people being made redundant, asset stripping, poor pay and dangerous working conditions, irrationality in market pricing, letting kids go hungry, ignoring the disabled – the list could go on.
These issues exist because of human will – not chance. Someone somewhere for some reason has made a decision on these matters. And in doing so, someone else is going to suffer and those who have made the decision seem ignorant of the fact that a part of human society will begin to effectively die. And as that part atrophies, the atrophy will affect the rest of society and something – call it ‘humanity’ begins to be lost but also darker aspects of humanity can rise to the top.
It is the human propensity to meddle, to disrupt the collective stability in pursuit of individual gain or discretion or even sovereignty that is the problem. Chaos is profit to some.
Some of us just can’t stand to be part of something that works unless we are in charge of it or something, controlling the means the outputs, the metaphors destroying, what is natural.
So keep up the work on the metaphors. For men and women behaving like gods in pursuit of others peoples means of life and that of the planet for personal gain need to be brought down to earth and controlled.
We have been agonising over these very issues today. Chapter 4 is delayed….but we are wanting to deliver at least a good draft.
My post this morning is triggered by Ed Miliband wittering on about an Affordability crisis.
He is wrong , we have an investment crisis.
If he diverted investment from the revenue account to a investment fund he could both reduce energy prices and invest in infrastructure.
We have a crisis , but defining the crisis is as important as finding the right metaphor.
I think metaphors are well worth your while to explore, even though I think the Darwin one misfired somewhat.
Having initially been sceptical about the idea of “quantum economics”, I found those posts surprisingly illuminating. It forced the reader (well, me) to think about things they thought they knew in a different context, and challenged the previous understanding. Well worth while, though after so many posts there are now diminishing returns.
A couple of ideas that you (or Jacqueline?) might think about for a future series:
(1) Thermodynamics and kinetics. This thought was prompted by your recent realisation that the only time an animal is at equilibrium is when it is dead. I have a suspicion that quite a lot of conventional economic “facts” may only apply in a hypothetical equilibrium which of course never exists. But what does that imply for the real life dynamic process?
(2) Chaos theory. In this case prompted by a book I have been reading. I was struck by the way meteorology has to be understood as a chaotic system, with the well-known quip that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon might affect whether there is a tornado in Texas. That has had important – and successful – implications for weather forecasting. Rather than running a single forecast on a computer, what they do is a large number of runs based on variations of the starting conditions. If the resultant forecasts are clustered together then there is confidence in them, but at some point chaotic behaviour causes widely different outcomes from slight changes in initial conditions and that signals uncertainty. Practical economics seems to involve a lot of “what if” predictions, often based on modelling, and it really ought to incorporate measures of uncertainty.
Both noted. We will discuss.
And Darwin? We took on neo-Darwinism. Read it that way and it worked. We rejected the idea that genes define destiny and we cannot avoid our DNA. We very clearly can. This idea (not in Darwin, of course) is what defines much of the philosophy of neoliberalism.
Although its not a metaphor , more a aphorism , Keynes:’ anything we can actually do we can afford’ seems a brilliant way of haling the ‘household’ metaphor in its tracks. It almost tells a story – or and least it is the beginning of a story that the hearer would want to know more.
Agreed
Metaphors and narratives go hand in hand.
Pretty much every explanation of everything is a metaphor, people primarily think in metaphors, the trick is to have the right one.
Science uses them constantly, there are more billiard balls in physics than in a snooker championship, “Particle” is a metaphor, every time it’s used you’re telling people to conjure up a picture of a small, round, discrete entity – with highly variable reliability. The Big Bang is a metaphor and, according to some of the latest thinking, a really rather poor one.
Common metaphors can become so ingrained that we don’t think of them as a metaphor
“I’m trying to get out of doing that” is a metaphor, as of course is “left” and “right” politics.
Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) is the standard work on the all pervasive nature of metaphors.
https://wisewords.blog/book-summaries/metaphors-we-live-by-book-summary/
Thank you. I like Lakoff’s work. This is good.