ABSTRACT
There are consequences to the stories economists tell. As a discipline, we are just beginning to value a narrative approach to the way we talk. 1 Donald McCloskey, one of the first to draw attention to our storytelling, argues that rhetorical criticism provides a model of self-consciousness for economists (1985: 182). He points out that the stories we tell carry an ethical burden, and that we tend to conceal this burden under a “cloak of science,” when we claim that our stories are “positive, not normative” (1990: 135). Diann Strassmann and Livia Polanyi show that when economists theorize and create models, they in fact construct “storyworlds” based on “default assumptions” that are presumed to be shared by the community for whom the stories are intended. The unspecified portions of the storyworld are so much taken for granted that they can easily be filled in by the members of the interpretive community (1995). When we talk economics, many underlying assumptions are hidden and never questioned. The act of concealment is very effective, and, as Strassmann argues, the detachment of the narrator serves to hide issues of value and power that in fact help the interpretive community regenerate itself by selecting and socializing new members (1993: 160). Through rhetorical devices, plots and metaphors, economists thus construct a world and its inhabitants in their own image.
