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.
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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.
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.