When Metaphors Go Bad (part 1)

The study of metaphors in economics and political reporting might seem a niche and unimportant thing. But metaphors are a life and death matter.

Earlier this year the aptly named Bank of England economist, Hugh Pill, told journalists that unemployment was the cure the country needed to tackle inflation. Bloomberg reported him as saying “the economy needs to “take some medicine now” to tackle the inflation “virus”. 

There is a dark irony in the idea of “prescribing” unemployment as a health cure, one that only works if we elevate the health of the economy over and above the literal health of humans who constitute the economy. It’s worth stating there is strong evidence that unemployment correlates closely with poor human health outcomes, wellbeing and life expectancy. In this sense one could argue that unemployment is actually a poison, not a medicine.

Pill's remarks didn’t pass without criticism, but surely it’s worrying that a respected member of the policy elite feels comfortable talking this way? It would be less concerning if it was a niche view. In truth, it’s part of a broad spectrum of economic argument that uses the same human health / medical metaphor to legitimise economic policy.  

The UK covid inquiry revealed an more extreme, arguably pathological version of this metaphor to justify policy. The inquiry confirmed that at various points during the pandemic ex-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, complained that locking down the economy meant  “we’re killing the patient [the economy] to tackle the tumour [covid]”.  

The UK experienced a disproportionate number of deaths during the pandemic so in this context, I think it’s not hyperbole to claim that metaphors really can kill.

In a bid to make sense of it, I’ve been asking two questions:

1. Is this medical metaphor common within economic / business / political discourse?

2. If so, what rhetorical function does it play in elite policy discourses?

Metaphor app

So I built a metaphor detection app to test written texts for metaphorical language. I tested the app on a year’s worth of historic BBC business reporting.

My initial findings are that:

• A medical metaphor was common in the BBC’s business coverage of  economics, markets and a wide range of metaphors, including mental health metaphors (confidence, worry, nerves etc) were used to describe the economy

• The metaphor played a conventional role in helping to describe the “the economy” in simple terms, but in addition

• The medical metaphor also plays a role in establishing the “ethos” or authority of media spokespeople  who are considered experts on the economy.

Our discourse is dominated by metaphorical “keys”

Critical metaphor academic, Jonathan Charteris-Black argues that our political discourse is dominated by a particular set of metaphorical keys and words and that these are central to how politics is framed. 

He also argues that a set of metaphorical keys dominate business and economics reporting, see table 1 below.

I programmed Charteris-Black’s schema into a my app (note the app is very rudimentary but could be improved with “Part of Speech” , “Named Entity Recognition” other metaphor identification technologies). 

The app is programmed to search for and quantify the use of these metaphoric keys and words. The BBC corpus consisted of 580 business stories published between 2004 and 2005.

The app can:

1. Recognize the metaphor keys and words in table 1;

2. Visualise their frequency across the BBC corpus; and

3. Provide a qualitative test, by carving out "context windows" around individual  candidate metaphoric words to evaluate whether their meaning was metaphorical or literal (context is key when interpreting metaphors).

Findings

Table 2 - the number of times metaphors equating the economy and human health, appeared in the BBC corpus.

“Health”

A metaphor that equated human health with financial or economic performance was common in the corpus (appearing just under 40 times). The objects of the health metaphor were:

• Economies

• Markets 

• Business / economic sectors, and

• Individual organisations / businesses

• Statistics

This metaphor often extended to economic and financial statistics (inflation, GDP, balance of payments etc) which were often referred to in a way that was analogous to the way doctors use biological markers (pulse, cholesterol etc) to assess the health of patients. Some contextual examples are below.

“Recovery”

“Recovery” was a salient metaphor across the corpus, with 62 instances of this candidate metaphor. I applied “context windows” to each instance of the word “recovery” to interpret whether it was being used metaphorically. My view is that by far the majority of the instances of the word “recovery” were metaphorical in meaning. 

This was so ubiquitous across the corpus that it was hard to distinguish the metaphorical use of “recovery”  from its literal use. It was deeply embedded in the way journalists reported. The objects or entities that the metaphor of recovery was most often applied to were:

• Economies

• Markets 

• Business / economic sectors, and

• Individual organisations / businesses

“Recovery” had positive connotations relating to growth and rebuilding. When reporters used it they were doing so in an overwhelmingly positive way.  The recovery metaphor was framed in a number of ways: see table 4.

“Confidence” 

The psychological attitude of “confidence” was heavily salient in the corpus, occurring 44 times. The objects of the confidence metaphor were nearly always:

• Consumers

• Businesses

• Markets

In economic reporting the persona of  the “consumer” was nearly always used to consumers as a group or statistical category. Yet journalists were still able to ascribe a mental health metaphor to this group. Consumers were framed as “having” or lacking “confidence”,  in the same way that businesses and markets were. Some contextual examples are below.

Conclusion (part 1)

A metaphor of human health seems a fairly common feature in elite discourse about the economy and in business / economics reporting.

Metaphors play a crucial role in helping us to make sense of the world and our existence. There’s nothing particularly controversial about this, but it’s worth noting. Other metaphors may well be in used in the policy discourse and I will be doing further research to uncover these.

However, there is a further role that the medical metaphor plays in helping to establish the authoritative ethos of spokespeople and policy elites when they talk about the economy.  In my next newsletter I will examine the rhetorical role of the metaphor and how, in addition to helping explain and make sense of the economy, it operates to establish something about the authority of policy and political elites.

I also want to suggest some ideas I have about how we might use the medical metaphor to set out a more progressive story on the economy.