One thing I've noticed about the false people, both the people caught up in falsehoods and those dispensing falsehoods, is a consistent and often repetitive use of metaphor instead of simple facts or mathematics. (e.g. "Fiscal Cliff" anyone?)
This is out of my area (I am most comfortable with numbers), but I feel I have to get involved here in the semantics because I believe that we who are led to seek to help our fellow citizens reach a full understanding of our monetary systems will not be able to help all of the people we encounter to understand these truths through mathematics.
Many among us do not possess the mathematical cognitive gifts to be able to have these truths revealed to them through mathematics. Therefore, part of the battle will have to be fought in a completely semantic theater, this does not look like it will be easy (especially for me).
I've made the observation that in individuals who cannot sort out the truth mathematically, it seems all they have available to them is a sort of "appeal to authority" in their quest to discern truth. They have no choice but to "believe someone else", they have no other option.
It also seems there is no shortage of other individuals who seek to have others believe their falsehoods, and it looks like at least one weapon they use in their quest to deceive is the metaphor.
I came across this blog (looks like it is shut down :( ) where this gal is looking into metaphor. And she cites an interesting procedure one can run through to detect metaphor:
I shall use an example from “Metaphor. A Practical Introduction”, 2nd Edition, by Zoltan Kovecses. He quotes the Pragglejaz group and their “metaphor identification procedure” (MIP):
1. Read the entire text-discourse to establish a general understanding of the meaning.
2. Determine the lexical units in the text-discourse:
3. (a) For each lexical unit in the text, establish its meaning in context, that is, how it applies to an entity, relation, or attribute in the situation evoked by the text (contextual meaning). Take into account what comes before and after the lexical unit.
(b) For each lexical unit, determine if it has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in the given context. For our purposes, basic meanings tend to be
• More concrete (what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel, smell, and taste)
• Related to bodily action
• More precise (as opposed to vague)
• Historically older.
Basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meanings of the lexical unit.
(c) If the lexical unit has a more basic current-contemporary meaning in other contexts than the given context, decide whether the contextual meaning contrasts with the basic meaning but can be understood in comparison with it.
4. If yes, mark the lexical unit as metaphorical.
(Pragglejaz Group, 2007,p. 3)So this is a formal process where we can detect even metaphors that are very subtle looks like.
It seems we humans probably cannot communicate semantically without use of metaphor, so use of metaphor by itself is probably not "bad" per se, but we must realize that metaphors are NOT technically the truth or perhaps better they are not reality.
As a quick recommendation (I'm just getting into this), I would encourage truth seekers who are semantic to at least challenge those who continuously dispense metaphor, challenge these people to abandon the use of metaphor and simply explain themselves using facts and perhaps limited mathematics.
If the dispenser of the metaphor CANNOT do that, continue on to seek another authority who can.
42 comments:
Wow Matt, I wish that made sense to me. (What is a lexical unit?) From my dim memory I have "A IS B" is a metaphor and "A IS LIKE B" is a simile.
So for example "money is debt" is a metaphor, one that helps me not at all.
Anyway: XKCD.
I just watched your video rant on youtube. I have been a supporter of MMT, but people like you are a disgrace to the cause. It doesn't reflect well on a 50 year old man to sit in his basement with his iPhone on a tripod recording himself having a meltdown over some younger woman's boobs. Get a grip. Older men like you make me sick with your droopy balls. You must have to chase them away with a fly swatter mike
Art,
You tell me ;)
This is not my strong area...
But... even with my feeble mind I am eventually able to tell when I am beating my head against a wall for a long time...
I think our "wins" in this so far have been via the mathematical channel at core .... perhaps exclusively.
I dont think we should give up on the semantics among us as they may represent perhaps a majority of people... we are probably going to have to go over and engage them "on their own turf"... dont ask me how to do this at this time...
in this regard I am seeking to first understand the semantic strategies and tactics of these dispensers of the false (e.g. think Peterson) ... perhaps with a better understanding of these techniques we will be better equipped to operate against them ...
They use repetitive metaphor for sure... they rely on constancy too looks like..
Looks like repetitive constant metaphor is definitely involved in order for the false to remain in view...
rsp,
Carter,
He's not "having a meltdown (metaphor) over her boobs".
Mike is indignant that Lyster is apparently satisfied playing the "boob" here with her fantastic assertion that "mother nature" (another metaphor!) is providing access to some metal at a rate that should be acceptable to real human beings who possess authority to manage their own economic affairs separate from anything going on in nature...
Snap out of it.
Art,
Ive read that the word "money" is a metonym.
More on metaphor and metonymy at Oxford:
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199240050.001.0001/acprof-9780199240050-chapter-7
This of course also looks like it is "over my head" for now...
(seemingly hard to communicate in writing without use of metaphor)
rsp,
Ive read that the word "money" is a metonym.
Only in the commodity theory of money, as far as I can see, where money signifies a unit of a particular commodity as numeraire.
Tom,
but it seems Art has a problem with the metaphor "money is debt"...
Why does "money" have to be "is anything" if the word is well defined/understood?
If it was well understood, we wouldnt be having all of these semantic discussions...
I see Art's issue here... rsp,
I think that speaking of money as debt is uselessly confusing to most people. Money is not "debt," it is credit. Of course, every credit is balanced on someone's books with a debit.
A dollar bill is a tax credit wrt non-govt, where is an asset, and it shows up as a liability on the govt's books. Moreover, money in a bank deposit account is a credit on the bank's books as a customer asset and a liability of the bank. If that dollar was created by bank lending, then it also shows up as a loan (account receivable) on the LHS of the bank's books.
Money is also used as a credit in purchases. We don't pay for stuff with debts; we purchase stuff with credits.
I think that the metaphor for money is that "Money is a debt token"
In other words, if I have money, then it is a token of somebody who is indebted to me, and I can use that token to clear my own debt - which is what I do when I purchase something for that money. If there is no debt relationship, then there is no money!
Thus when I do work for the government, the government is in my debt, and it issues the debt tokens called dollars to acknowledge that debt.
The clearest example of the indebtedness relationship in a purchase is "eating at a restaurant." Once I am eating the restaurant food, I am in debt to the restaurant, until I extinguish that debt with a payment. If I pay before I eat, as happens in some eating establishments, then the eating establishment is in my debt until I have finished eating.
And of course throughout this process, the government remains in debt to the holder of the dollars, until the dollars return to the government as a payment of taxes
Why do we have to use metaphor at all here??????
That is where the trouble starts... the Greeks were too smart to get trapped up in this, they just used a unique term nomisma to specifically designate what they were talking about...
rsp,
Let's cut out the metaphor....
Can we?????
rsp,
I'm starting to see how this deceptive stuff works...
just bring in metaphor and all hell breaks loose... "money is this".. "no, money is that"...etc..
nobody can know what anyone else is talking about... and then we get snared in some sort of arguments.. and the pure semantic people have to simply choose sides...
We should seek to not get caught up in this....
rsp,
Matt,
You can't get out of that situation. Even if you were to define it mathematically, money will be defined as a measure of the magnitude of a debt relationship.
If there are no debt relationships in a society, there is no money in that society either.
Matt,
MMT calls it "vertical" money. NFA in the narrow sense.
Whenever we in the MMT community discuss money it almost always means NFA.
The mainstream definitions of "money" and "money supply" are pretty much useless for any analytical purpose.
Some of us have positive NFA, some of us negative. We know what the total is.
We should probably be more specific when we discuss it, but there isn't really much confusion except with the anal types or those that are unaware of context.
"If there are no debt relationships in a society, there is no money in that society either." - Clonal
This statement is and always be obtuse and confusing to 99.9% of the population, so why try to explain it to them? If our goal is to get our ideas across this isn't going to help.
It is also meaningless in a mathematical context…it only has meaning in the context of accounting systems.
Accounting isn't the system of choice used by scientists and engineers to analyze mathematical relationships…accounting is a reporting tool and is quite limited as far as mathematics is concerned.
Clonal,
"If there are no Hershey Bars in a society, there is no candy in that society either.."
that is how I see your statement here... just for FD .... ie I am NOT a semantic person.. this is the way my brain sees it... (not saying "My way is right")...
rsp,
"accounting is a reporting tool "
"How much concrete did you use?"
vs.
"How much concrete should you use?"
audit
vs
design
Why do we have to use metaphor at all here??????
To communicate semantically, metaphors are necessary. "They" have the powerful metaphors. "We" need to develop some strong counters instead of just getting all wonky.
Right Tom the "wonky" usually leads to some sort of mathematical explanations that many simply cant get imo ...
I would point out that the community continues to make pretty good mathematical explanations imo that ARE working with many folks who possess the math cognition....
My initial thoughts are to directly confront their metaphors with a direct challenge to remove them... and keep it up until for them they will usually take the "flight" option in a "fight or flight" response....
As we are usually at core making mathematical appeals, they will not be able to counter.... math contains no metaphor...
... and then perhaps slip our own metaphor in later as a mop up....
rsp,
To paraphrase Alfred Marshall, do the math and then put it in words. It has to be mathematically correct and also SFC, but it also has to be understandable to a fifteen year old and compelling to voters. That means using the familiar, and metaphor is the tried and true way of doing that.
... metaphor is the tried and true way of doing that..."
I wish I was wrong but I don't think it's quite that simple...one can describe the primary net flow in the economy as the flow of sand in an hourglass...it's about as simple and direct as one could get in describing the nature of spending flows and stocks, but I doubt it would be much help in improving the understanding of the dynamic.
Yes, but no one today remembers hourglasses now that we have digital timers. A metaphor has to be familiar in addition to being apt to be powerful. We still have bathtubs and that is an apt and familiar metaphor for illustrating stock-flow, for instance.
Paul,
I'm not sure that you or I for sure can truly understand what is going on in a semantic persons brain when they stare at an hour glass... I get the feeling what is going on is quite different than at least I readily think....
they might be thinking of "being at the beach" or something... where I am trying to estimate how long it will take until the all the sand falls...
This is going to be difficult....
I think the most important characteristics are that the flow is uni-directional, and once the process reaches maximum entropy nothing further can happen until there is a reset...an external event...the hourglass is a closed system.
A tub of water works also, but a tub has no flow unless there are leakages, faucets, etc. so it's somewhat less direct in the scheme of things.
Are we that old that we can't count on younger folks knowing what an hourglass is? What a wake-up call. ;-)
Not a matter of remembering. It's a matter of using something very familiar in the culture to illustrate a point. The point of rhetoric in argument is to make the argument compelling both logically and emotionally. That's why the govt as big household or firm analogy works so effectively and has the whole country buffaloed. This is what we are up against.
A good example is AMI's pitch for "debt-free money" and MMT's brush-off that "money is debt." Who do you think will win this argument in the public arena?
Aces Tom....
Her assertion is at core based on Quantity Theory Bob and is false.
the whole quantity theory is GARBAGE...
get it?
Quantitiy Theory is Garbage.
"MMT's brush-off that "money is debt…"
Tom, I think this is a serious mischaracterization.
Do any MMT academics really make that argument…that money is debt? Does anyone think it matters one whit that money is debt in the technical sense?
It's an argument semantic thinkers came up with to explain the unexplainable. It has no place in a mathematical analysis.
Most people that can be won over with these kinds of arguments will never truly understand and will get stuck at every new idea moving forward. We should try to answer their questions but we shouldn't expect them to fully understand.
Hell, there's a part of the MMT community that doesn't really understand MMT.
We need to try to reach more of the reachable rather than try to force-feed MMT to those that aren't likely to get it anyway. We need to target the curious.
Each semantic thinker will respond differently to the same argument. Must we custom-tailor the argument for each person? Those grounded in math will mostly get the idea quickly. Much easier assignment.
I don't know that there are any good arguments that can be made when dealing with superstition and the conventional wisdom based on it.
Our only hope is to earn people's trust by being right when the rubber meets the road.
Until we earn a certain level of trust we won't make any inroads. I hope to be proven wrong.
/rant off
"Sound money leads to the increasing value of such money"- Bob
This is so unimportant in comparison to there being enough spending in the right hands. No decent engineer would waste his time on something with such a neglegible effect. Nor should any decent economist.
"the Austrian critique of math formulas in economics"
There's no similarity between "math formulas in economics" and system relationships which are recognizable patterns occurring throughout our universe and have the added significance that exceptions to them have never been observed. These are laws that can be observed almost anywhere one looks.
Supply and Demand is a direct function of spending. Most spending is created by the government, both by recycling existing funds and creating new.
Why aren't Pakistan and India getting Mother Nature's supply and demand love? Somalia?
Paul,
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_647.pdf
"This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money:
(1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy
money, but goods do not buy goods.
(2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition
because, if it were, that would mean that a particular good is buying goods.
(3) Default on debt is possible."
I'm positing that we need a two pronged attack...
Yes, keep the mathematical characterizations going... and it is going pretty well there imho...
but I submit that some will never get the math... and they represent A LOT of the people out there... they are lost and caught up in semantic falsehoods... we have to come up with our own strategies to counter this as Tom points out..
We need to be thinking more of a semantic offense as well... of course this is not personally my strong area...
rsp
"why do we need taxes to prevent inflation? Hmmmmm?"
We don't but they can be used as a tool to control it to some extent. I think we have inflation pretty much under control…the rate has been declining for thirty years. At the rate we're going we will hit zero in a decade.
Go read about the reasoning behind and the implementation of progressive taxation (thanks to our old Republican friend Theodore Roosevelt) to see the beauty and elegance of our system. Taxes keep the machine running if we only tax excess.
An electrical circuit loses all of it's energy to heat while getting work done. Our economic system collects the excess and runs it through over and over again to make the machine go, efficient but not perpetual motion…this requires management of the kind the free market can't provide.
Do any MMT academics really make that argument…that money is debt? Does anyone think it matters one whit that money is debt in the technical sense?
It's core. Here's Randy:
This paper advances three fundamental propositions regarding money: (1) As R. W. Clower (1965) famously put it, money buys goods and goods buy money, but goods do not buy goods. (2) Money is always debt; it cannot be a commodity from the first proposition because, if it were, that would mean that a particular good is buying goods. (3) Default on debt is possible. These three propositions are used to build a theory of money that is linked to common themes in the heterodox literature on money. link
I am not saying it is not correct technically, just that it's a non-starter publicly. thinkI that "credit" is a more promising term that conveys essentially the same thing more positively than "debt," which has a strong negative connotation. Moreover, the technical economic sense of "debt" is different from the ordinary use. This ambiguity invites confusion.
this requires management of the kind the free market can't provide.
Free marketers presume that firms require management wrt markets and militaries require management wrt to defense, but not governments wrt economies. It's a non-sequitur.
Matt,
Yes, money is debt in the technical sense as I said. The point I was trying to make is that it is not a major part of the MMT plank. It's a defensive move of necessity to counteract ignorance (the idea that it matters in any real world sense).
As far as semantic arguments go I'm with you, I can think of a dozen different ways to try to explain the system structure but none have been very effective.
I'm going with the "be right" approach and win trust, let the marketing types sell whatever it takes to get the people on our side.
The more pain they feel the easier they will be to convince.
You can't force people to change their minds against their will.
"It's core."
Tom, we're miscommunicating again I think. I see what you mean re the distinction between "debt" and "credit" and I agree with that completely.
This is what "core" means to me…The distinction between "debt" and "credit" or the fact that "money is debt" will not result in a penny's worth of difference in the balance sheets of the non-government.
It may be "core" however wrt the understanding of why public "debt" is not the burden many think it is, although I see it more as a defensive move against the superstition of "debt-based money".
LOTS of interesting thoughts above.
There are three important words that are useful to describe the "texture" (pardon my metaphor) of the economy:
1. money
2. credit
3. debt
I think we need to distinguish between the three words to understand the texture. If we fail to distinguish then we have only two words at our disposal, or only one.
The act of putting credit to use creates both money and debt. The money moves into circulation, but the debt remains with the borrower. To my mind there is no way to equate the three terms.
"You can't force people to change their minds against their will."
Perhaps they are being deceived Paul.
iow they are not making a "free will" choice, but rather, having no mathematical path to the truth in this, are susceptible to the charms of the dispensers of falsehoods... and are led to subject themselves to them...
Here's Paul:
"...that we may by no means still be minors, surging hither and thither and being carried about by every wind of teaching, by human caprice, by craftiness with a view to the systematizing of the deception." Eph 4:14
The Greek word for "systematizing" here is methodeian ....
looks like there's a whole method to this... and metaphor is involved in these methods ... rsp,
Matt,
This is exactly what is going on.
The MMT community's marketing skills or lack thereof is not the main problem.
There has been a systematic investment in the infrastructure of false credentialism and the capture of academia and government by certain vested interests over the past decades while we were sleeping.
This gets back to the "appeal to authority" approach.
These things we are discussing are obtuse to most people, so they take the "shortcut" and follow other peoples thinking. They follow authority. Credentialism.
They are basically worshiping false Gods.
This is a huge nut for any emerging truth to crack, it will take years of investment in our own infrastructure, which Warren, Bill, Stephanie, Randy, Scott et al have been doing with great success considering the forces stacked against them.
Then we get impatient and blame the messenger because things are moving slowly.
"I think we need to distinguish between the three words to understand the texture." - Art
This is getting to the root of the problem. Of the three words, money and debt are the most elusive, they each represent many different things in varying contexts.
In the MMT world, money is simple…NFA or vertical money. To the rest of the world "money" is so vague as to be nearly useless.
Debt is really tough because it leads to the concept of "obligation", which itself has many meanings in varying contexts.
By the time these terms are used together in a sentence we have created many permutations of understanding simultaneously.
Roger E. is constantly banging on the importance of context in evaluating or parsing the meaning of peoples comments.
There are many out there in the wild that seem to get perverse pleasure in twisting other peoples statements so that the conversation never advances.
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