ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the supply and demand frameworks that have grounded economists' opposition to higher wage policies, such as current living wage campaigns, and note some startling logical discontinuities. It discusses how neoclassical uses of metaphor have resulted in an analysis with no connection to actual processes in labor markets; the analysis serves to naturalize and depoliticize the market arguments of standard theory. The chapter shows the process by which real-world referents for favored metaphors were lost, and logical problems crept in, is clearly visible within the work of such major figures as J. B. Clark, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Douglas. Metaphors that have been widely accepted may no longer be perceived as metaphors at all. Having lost their original startling impact, they are sometimes referred to as "dead metaphors." Living wage campaigns seek to make actual changes, but also to repoliticize and challenge such preconceptions and the dead metaphors on which they are based.
