WHY is there such strong political support for fiscal austerity, for government cuts and layoffs, at a time of widespread unemployment?
Maybe it’s because we have the wrong metaphor stuck in our minds, and it’s framing policy choices in a misleading way.
Clearly, metaphors and other symbols carry real weight in our thinking, as has been shown by George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher at the University of Oregon. In their 1980 book, “Metaphors We Live By,” they argue, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
Our metaphors are like the icons on our computer screen, little pictures by which we condense complexities into manageable packets to refer to in our decision-making. Our brains may be hard-wired for them.
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