Metaphors We Live By

"I first read this book innocently, I could say, in the late 1990s. I was part of the team writing the Human Development Report at the UN at the time, and we were talking about ‘lifting people out of poverty’. One of my colleagues, the philosopher Christian Barry, remarked that it sounded a bit like a helicopter airlift. What’s behind this idea that we ‘lift’ people out of poverty? And what is poverty—is it a hole? Then we started talking about the metaphors that we do development by, and I came across this book and was fascinated to go into the roots of the linguistic power of metaphors and to realise that almost everything we say is riddled through with metaphors. I just used one there—as if language were a plank of wood and metaphors are the holes that the woodworms leave. Everything we say is imbued with metaphors that we don’t even notice because they’re structured into the English language. So, I was just fascinated to become aware of all the metaphors embedded in the way I was speaking and, therefore, shaping the way I was thinking about what was and what wasn’t possible. Like if people are ‘lifted’ out of poverty, is it something they therefore can’t get out of by themselves? Must they be lifted out by others? And the air-lift metaphor already embeds in us the idea that there’s a passive victim that’s rescued by someone who heroically comes along and lifts them out. That metaphor is already framing and delimiting what we can imagine is possible. So, I read this book a long time ago and didn’t think about it actively in terms of economics until, years later, I came around to wanting to go back to the roots of economics. Aware of George Lakoff’s more recent work, Don’t Think of an Elephant, I remembered the power of his arguments and I went back to this book, and was really struck by two things in it. The first is the role of what the authors call orientational metaphors, and one of the most fundamental ones that’s in use in the English language is that good is forwards and good is up. Hence we say: ‘things are on the move again,’ or: ‘we seem to be going backwards,’ ‘why are you looking so down?’, ‘I’m feeling up again.’ We have this very basic physical orientation in the world thanks to our bodies. Think of when a child first starts to crawl: first they go awkwardly backwards, then forwards, and then eventually they pull themselves up to standing, and we all clap. There’s this sense of forwards and upwards as progress, and we apply it throughout our lives. No, forwards and upwards is indeed a part of life and growth. But taken too literally and simplistically it becomes deeply embedded in the way that we interpret the world. No wonder that it so quickly gets adopted in economic language. Think of a graph of a nation’s GDP, gross domestic product, the policymakers’ aim is to keep it moving always upwards. Any deviation from that is bad. And listen to the metaphors that people use to talk about the economy, such as talk of ‘the green shoots of recovery’ which imply that the economy is a plant. Of course we all want our plants and gardens to grow, just as we want our children to grow. Well my children are now aged eight and are growing very fast but I sincerely hope at some point that they’ll stop growing because, otherwise, they won’t be able to sit with me at my kitchen table. We know that growth is not an unalloyed good because if I were to tell you I went to the doctor and she told me I had a growth, you know that this would be bad news. When something starts to grow uncontrollably within a healthy living system it will disrupt the very system on which it depends, and in our own bodies we call it cancer. We should look again at the way that nature grows: plants don’t keep trying to grow bigger forever, they grow until they are mature, and can thrive that way for decades, even centuries. So, I found it fascinating to use this book’s insights into the orientational metaphor to understand why the idea of growth is so deeply rooted in our social and economic aspirations, but also to go back and examine the underlying metaphors in economics texts—how they actually limit and frame the way we see economic possibilities. And if I want to be part of changing economic thought, how can I do so by challenging and changing these metaphors that we use? We can’t get rid of metaphors in our language. We need them—that’s how we communicate: we liken one thing to another by experience. But we should replace metaphors that are outdated with metaphors that are more fitting for our times. Exactly. As Lakoff argues, conservatives in the US are more likely to have studied business and to be savvy to marketing and the power of communication, and they understand that you need to bring that into political communication. Hence they tend to use frames, slogans and motivating language very powerfully. Whereas, the left or the progressives will more tend to think ‘if I show you the facts and statistics, you’ll agree with me’, and so don’t draw on the power of framing so effectively. So, his argument is that progressives should reframe debates in their own language—because you’re really throwing yourself onto your opponents’ turf if you merely try to negate their frame. The classic example that he gives is US conservatives advocating ‘tax relief’. Who could possibly be against tax relief? It’s a relief, therefore tax is a burden and whoever takes it away is a hero. Just with one word – ‘relief’ – they’ve created a powerful frame. To counter this position, instead of saying ‘I’m against tax relief’, you need to argue for, say, ‘tax justice’, which is a completely different frame and shifts the terms of debate. So, never engage in a debate using your opponents’ terms; always create a competing frame. One way I think of this is that sometimes the best form of protest is to propose something new. “When something starts to grow uncontrollably within a healthy living system it will disrupt the very system on which it depends, and in our own bodies we call it cancer” Lakoff is a master at showing us the terrain of verbal framing. I find his work incredibly inspiring, and what I wanted to do with Doughnut Economics was to focus on the counterpart—what I call visual framing. Just as words frame understanding, so do pictures. In writing my book, I wanted to reveal not only the verbal metaphors of economics but also the visual metaphors. These are drawn into the most basic diagrams of economic theory that many professors think are mere illustrations on the side of the page to accompany the equations. But, in fact, anyone who knows about visual cognition will tell you that as many as half of the neurons in our brains are implicated in seeing, and what is processed in our visual cortex often remains in our brain for decades, which is why you will recognise someone from your primary school in the street if you happen to pass them. Visual frames are powerful because they slip into our minds almost effortlessly: they don’t have to be put into words that can then be interrogated. That, to me, is the hidden power of visual framing. What’s more, the power of the frame is often not what is drawn on the page but what is not shown. Again, because it’s never put into words, we rarely realise what’s missing. The day I realised this power of visual framing for rewriting economics—it was 5th August 2015—I was sitting in a café on the Cowley Road in Oxford, doodling ideas in my notebook and suddenly realised that I could sum up the story of old economics in seven key images that encapsulated those powerful frames, and I could replace them with seven new images that begin to set out an alternative frame. I think of these visual frames as graffiti on the mind that lingers long after the words and equations have faded and, as with most graffiti, they are extremely hard to scrub off, so the best thing to do is to paint over them with a new mural. In my book I wanted to highlight these old frames, show how they limit our thinking, show how they directly influence thinking and policy today, and then replace them with new visual frames that are far more fitting for our times."