I think it might be worth listening carefully to the language of the various political parties as they vie for public support at their various party conferences. How do they ‘frame’ the country’s current economic woes? How do they talk about the crisis whilst gaining ‘economic credibility’?

According to two Yale professors (Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw) in an article in the New York Times, the way that the economy is discussed in the US has moved from talk about the average Joe, common institutions and a common history which dominated public discourse in the 1930s to individual choice and personal agency now. The words have changed:

“[T]here is a crucial difference between then and now: the words that our political leaders use to talk about our problems have changed. Where politicians once drew on a morally resonant language of people, family and shared social concern, they now deploy the cold technical idiom of budgetary accounting.

“This is more than a superficial difference in rhetoric. It threatens to deprive us of the intellectual resources needed to address today’s problems.” (my emphasis)

The point here is that intellectual resources include the ability to think and express ideas.  As we lose the words we lose the thought. As they summarise:

Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately.

Can we talk about this? Maybe not.

 

[Link: How Do You Say ‘Economic Security’? - NYTimes.com]