The financial crisis as a heart attack

Abstract

The article analyzes the role of economists in public discourse with regard to the financial crisis. Specifically, it focuses on the prevailing rhetorical strategies and the economic convictions of leading German-speaking economists as they appear in seven leading newspapers and magazines in the German-speaking area. Special attention is given to the prevailing rationales and explanations for the financial crisis as well as on the metaphors used for describing specific economic events in particular and the market economy in general. The results of this article show that while the financial crisis could have offered a possibility for a paradigm shift in economic thinking, there is not much evidence for such a shift among German-speaking economists. The observed stability of the dominant paradigm is attributed primarily to the very stable role of certain basic economic convictions, which are exposed through the use of specific metaphors as well as a characterization of the financial crisis as a series of extraordinary and exogenously given events. (e.g. “a tsunami” or “earthquake”)

‘Piketty is a genius, but … ’: an analysis of journalistic delegitimation of Thomas Piketty’s economic policy proposals

“…Combined with their distinguished social position, they act as authoritative actors legitimising and perpetuating dominant discursive ideas such as austerity as a crisis solution. Likewise, research on the post-financial crisis discourse shows that economists had a significant influence on the public interpretation of such crisis phenomena as extra-ordinary and abnormal events, thereby suppressing alternative discursive framings (Pühringer & Hirte, 2015). Others show thateven though economics has been subject to criticism in the aftermath of the financial crisisit remained stable in discursive terms (Dimmelmeier, Hafele, & Theine, in press;Fitzgerald & O'Rourke, 2016).…”

Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries

“…Thereby, the comparative analysis of national knowledge regimes by Campbell and Pedersen (2014) emphasizes the impact of institutionalized policy advice from economic research institutes in Germany. However, while the crisis of the corporatist German model has reduced the importance of institutionalized policy advice, economic experts from economic research institutes and newly funded think tanks still have a high impact on policymaking (Flickenschild and Afonso, 2018;Plehwe, 2017;P€ uhringer, 2020). Against this background, our paper addresses the political involvement of German economists on three different levels and aims to highlight paradigmatic as well as ideological power structures within politically involved economists, as recently shown for the U.S. by van Gunten et al (2016).…”

Exploring the Trade (Policy) Narratives in Economic Elite Discourse

“…For the special purpose of this paper we furthermore refer to recent literature in the field of socio-linguistics and social economics, aiming to highlight the role of language for the transmission of a distinct style of economic reasoning into policy and public debates (Jessop, 2013;Pühringer & Hirte, 2015). Originating in the seminal work of McCloskey (1983McCloskey ( , 1998, who first emphasized how even rather technical economic language is saturated with metaphors and rhetorical elements, several authors have stressed the specific role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise (Maesse, 2015).…”