Stale metaphors wanted…
How many different metaphors have been used to explain the deficit problem and competing ways to address it?
The ‘deficit like a credit-card’ one is widespread and been used & abused by Keynesians and monetarists alike. A variant on that casts the national economy like that of a household where incomings & outgoings are mismatched – I think Mrs Thatcher evoked that in her 1979 election campaign but perhaps someone can confirm. And yesterday David Blanchflower introduced a new one (to me anyway) in the form of imminent national invasion – apparently tomorrow George Osborne is about to surrender.
Any more I’ve missed?
Posted on October 19, 2010, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
Think of the deficit as a metaphor: a powerful use of it can help to generate energy and momentum, but if you stretch it to breaking point you’ll lose credibility and have to spend even longer trying to explain yourself.
(A meta-metaphor, if you like…)
Use of Metaphors in British politics – it’s a plague isn’t it?
And once one takes hold (or is hammered into public consciousness), then you get the phenomenon of “crowding out” in which the One Metaphor to Rule Them All overwhelms any and all alternative metaphors, images, analogies.
I think the other biggie from the days of Thatcherism was the National Cake, which had to be divided up – “fairly” of course. Never quite clear who was doing the dividing: mummy, the butler, a trained expert from the National Cake Cutting Bureau,…?