This podcast illustrates a number of the questions and themes we have been talking about. | |
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http://www.theonion.com/articles/woman-worried-student-loans-could-prevent-her-from,37002/
PHILADELPHIA—Lamenting that she will spend the foreseeable future paying off her college expenses, local 23-year-old digital marketing assistant Ashley Orlinsky expressed concern Wednesday that her student loans will prevent her from ever owning an entirely different type of utterly crippling debt. “Realistically, it’ll take years or even decades to fully repay $50,000 of loans, which makes me worried that I’ll never qualify for a backbreaking mortgage on a house that I can in no way afford,” said Orlinsky, adding that with $350 in monthly student loan payments, she will likely struggle to even borrow money to purchase a new car that will destroy her credit rating and may one day be repossessed by the bank. “I have dreams of starting my own company at some point in the future, but I just don’t see how I’ll have the opportunity to be saddled for my entire adult life with a suffocating high-interest small business loan if my student debt is following me wherever I go. It’s awful.” Orlinsky was reportedly encouraged, however, after coming to the mistaken conclusion that she could just default on her student loans and have them discharged in a bankruptcy filing. If translated into English, most of the ways economists talk among themselves would sound plausible enough to poets, journalists businesspeople, and other thoughtful though noneconomical folk. Like serious talk anywhere-among clothing designers and baseball fans, say-the talk is hard to follow when you have not made a habit of listening to it for a while. The culture of the conversation makes the words arcane. But the people in the unfamiliar conversation are not from another universe. Underneath it all (the economist's favorite phrase) conversational habits are similar. Economics uses mathematical models and statistical tests and market arguments, which look alien to the literary eye. But looked at closely they are not so alien. They may be seen as figures of speech-metaphors, analogies, and appeals to authority.
Figures of speech are not mere frills. They think for us. Says Heidegger, "Die Spracht spricht, nicht der Mensch": The language speaks, not the human speaker. Someone who thinks of a market as an "invisible hand" and the organization of work as a "production function" and her coefficients as being "significant," as an economist does, is giving the language a lot of responsibility. It seems a good idea to look hard at the language. … The service that literature can do for economics is to offer literary criticism as a model for self-understanding. (It would not be a very good model for polite behavior or even, I am afraid, literary style.) Literary criticism does not merely pass judgements of good or bad; in its more recent forms the question of good or bad hardly comes up. Mainly it's concerned with making readers see how poets and novelists accomplish their results. An economic criticism of the sort exercised here is not a way of attacking economics, showing it to be bad because it is rhetorical. To repeat, everyone is rhetorical, from the mathematician to the lawyer. A literary criticism of economics is just a way of showing how economics accomplishes its results. --Deirdre N. McCloskey. The Rhetoric of Economics (Rhetoric of the Human Sciences) (Kindle Locations 140-147, 173-177). Kindle Edition. |