Don't Buy It The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy

Anat Shenker-Osorio has spent her career exploring the range of ways people understand complex political issues and she's seen one thing over and again: when we're using the wrong metaphor, we're sending the wrong message. In this book she focuses that argument on the wrong headed and destructive way we talk about the economy in the United States. Relying heavily on language such as "unhealthy," "suffering," "recovery bill," we continually convey that the economy is something natural, like a body, the tides, or the weather. It is how it is -- like the barometric pressure, unemployment can be expected to "rise" and "fall." In fact, we've bought the idea that we must work without complaint and "Keep the Economy Happy!" Shenker-Osorio shows that this wrong headed way of conceptualizing the economy has a real effect on the way people engage with money, and it has lead to a great deal of hardship. The solution therefore is that by consciously shifting the ways we talk about the economy we can radically alter how we react to and thus make rules and decisions. By speaking, accurately, of the economy as a man-made system requiring continuous man made control we undo the damaging notion that the market is its own best control. By speaking, forcefully, of the economy as part of the pursuit for security and prosperity we can impose regulation and control to achieve certain means. Economic reform is going to require transparency and understanding in our conversation. This book tells us how.

Anat Shenker-Osorio is a strategic communications consultant based in Oakland, CA. She crafts messaging for issues from immigration to contraception and completed research on how people make sense of and come to judgments about the economy. Anat has worked with the ACLU, Ms Foundation, America's Voice, Ford Foundation and dozens of others, presenting findings to members of Congress, and as a keynote speaker at Netroots Nation. Don't Buy It is her first book.