ABSTRACT
In previous chapters we highlighted the challenges inherent in lay economic understanding. How then do people come to hold the opinions that they do? This chapter explores one avenue: reasoning by metaphor. Metaphors allow us to understand novel phenomena using familiar terms. At the cognitive level, this manifests in the process of structure mapping, which lies at the basis of analogical reasoning. Media and political discourse are suffused with economic metaphors, and these metaphors trickle down to the public. We review the discourse analysis literature and point to the most popular economic metaphors. We show how metaphors, though useful, carry a heavy cost; they highlight and hide, lead but mislead. By drawing on real-world examples, we show how metaphors infiltrate our mental representations and skew our understanding of important economic concepts. We explore the power of metaphor to activate our most basic modes of understanding the world – our “framework theories” of biology, psychology, and physics – bringing them to bear on economic actors and processes. In particular, intuitive psychology introduces highly significant biases to economic understanding, including conspiracist ideation and over-attribution of economic events to the intentions and actions of individuals.
