Most of us spend little time thinking about the concept of “socioeconomic metaphors.” But those metaphors can play a major role in determining how we view the role of government in our lives. That’s the contention of Max Borders, executive editor of the Free To Choose Network. He delivered an address to the John Locke Foundation’s Shaftesbury Society on the topic “Socioeconomic Metaphors: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Borders also discussed the topic with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: What is this all about?
Borders: Well, it’s just about the language we use to describe our society and our economy. Take, for example — you’ve read in the paper “Obama needs to ‘fix’ the economy. We need to get someone in there who will ‘run’ the economy.” Well, just those two words right there — “fix” and “run” — suggest something. They suggest that the metaphors we use to think about the economy are wrong. Well, first, that we’re using a certain type of metaphor, and, I would argue, that they’re wrong.
Kokai: The metaphor that you were pointing out here is, as you described it in your lecture, “society as machine.” Describe that metaphor for us.
Borders: Well, if you think back on all the guys at NASA during the Apollo missions, you have these big screens and these guys sitting in front of computers and rheostats and toggles and switches, and they’re all just trying to do one thing, which is get guys to the moon and back. It’s a very simple thing when you compare it to other kinds of phenomena, like economies, that are infinitely more complex. But the way people think about our economy is more like a machine. They think that we have all these wizards in Washington who are controlling the rheostats, that they’re controlling the toggles and the switches to move money around in the economy in the appropriate way that is going to give us a positive result. Well, the truth is, while some of them think that way and they think they can do that, it’s a false metaphor — because the economy is not like a machine at all. You can’t just move things around. It has individual actors buying and selling and interacting in certain ways that make it much too complicated for even the wizards in Washington to “run” or “fix.”
Kokai: If we think of our society or our economy as a machine, what kind of problems does that create — using that incorrect metaphor?
Borders: Well, one thing it’s going to do — and we’ve seen this happen a lot lately — are unintended consequences. If we think we have all the knowledge we need to run or fix an economy, and we try to do that, we can get certain consequences we didn’t anticipate. So, for example, we think we’re going to legislate that people have houses, and we pressure banks into giving people who are high-risk houses, for example. Or, we set the interest rates artificially low. These resulted in at least two aspects of the current housing bubble. We didn’t anticipate that this would happen; the unintended effects were terrible. They really hastened in the last big dip here of 2008 and 2009.
Kokai: In addition to “society as machine,” you mentioned that there are a couple of other false metaphors about society — “society as the family” or “society as a hive.” What are some problems with those metaphors?
Borders: Well, let’s take “society as family” first. Think about — and not to use something that’s going to be emotionally charged — but think about Nazi Germany. The way the Nazis tried to keep people together, one of the ways, is that all of the German people thought of themselves as a family and that the land was the father. They called it “the fatherland” — Vaterland. We’ve heard “motherland” for Russia. Even the word “patriotism” comes from pater, which means father. So we’ve got metaphors for families we use all the time. Trouble is, we’re not really families. We’re not even clans. The way we interact in our family, that you might interact in your family — I live in a … house pretty much where I’m the dictator. Well, I’m a co-dictator with my wife. Actually, she’s probably the dictator. In any case, we live in that kind of society, and that’s scalable within our family. And it’s even scalable in some small communities. But it is not scalable for widespread society, and that’s largely the reason that that’s a false metaphor.
Kokai: And when you say “scalable,” [you mean] that as you add more people, it could still work, but only up to a certain point.
Borders: That’s right, that’s right. At a certain point, you reach a critical mass of people engaging in certain kinds of relationships. For example, in clans, you could share — share and share alike. And you would hope that someone else would share back with you later if you were in a bad spot, for example, or you didn’t go on the hunt or whatever back in caveman days, or in tribal societies today. That is not a scalable arrangement. Whereas market arrangements of exchange, cooperation — good old Adam Smith — are scalable in the sense that market cooperation and exchange scales up much better than share-and-share-alike arrangements, for example.
Kokai: So we’ve talked about some of the metaphors that don’t work. Let’s talk about one that you think probably works a little bit better for the way that we view our society, and that is “society as an ecosystem.” Why would that be a better metaphor?
Borders: Well, you know, folks may disagree with me on this, but I think this is the best metaphor because, well, for a number of reasons. In fact, in my talk, I enumerated 10, but let me just go over a couple of them. There is a phenomenon called complex adaptive systems. Now, this is just a fancy way of saying that there are systems that are extremely complex, in that their parts interact in a complicated way. But there is no designer. There is no engineer. There is nobody running the show like the guys behind the rheostat bank at Houston, say, when they’re going to launch the space shuttle. These are the kinds of systems that are very well-ordered, and they grow and change and adapt, but they don’t have somebody running the show. The sooner we think about getting away from this idea of having someone running the show, the freer and more prosperous we’ll be as a people. And, the less we’ll have politicians doing crazy things like they’ve done in the last stimulus bill, for example. Basically the idea boils down to this: We are a human ecosystem. We interact with each other as individuals at a very local level, and the knowledge it would take to fully understand this economic ecosystem is too vast for any person or group of people ever to know. And this is an insight given us a long time ago by F.A. Hayek — The Road to Serfdom — if you haven’t gotten that, go get it.
Kokai: Yes, it’s a great book. Some people may say, “You know, this is kind of interesting, but so what? Why do the metaphors matter?” From your vantage point as someone who has looked at these metaphors, why is it important that we use an appropriate metaphor, not one that doesn’t work, as we view how our society functions?
Borders: The more we use metaphors like “fix” and “run” and employ language about “priming the pump,” for example, that they used in the Great Depression to “fix” the economy — these kinds of ways of speaking are going to keep us trapped in a situation where we’re going to set ourselves up for failure over and over again. We are seeing the results of the failure of this metaphor right now for policies of President Obama and this current Congress. We’ve got to get away from this way of thinking. We’ve got to get back to the fundamental institutions that the framers and the founders of the republic intended. Because these are the rule sets that allow people to exchange freely. If we run into economic problems, that’s OK. Self-organizing systems, complex systems that I mentioned before, like ecosystems, they heal from within, and that’s what we need to do.