Stephan Pühringer, Katrin Hirte,
"The financial crisis as a tsunami. Discourse profiles of economists in the financial crisis."
, in ICAE Uni Linz, Serie ICAE Working Paper Series, Nummer 14, 3-2013
Original Titel:
The financial crisis as a tsunami. Discourse profiles of economists in the financial crisis.
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
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?)
Keywords: financial crisis; failure of economics; language of economists; metaphors in public discourse; discourse profiles of economists
JEL Classification Numbers: A11, A14, G01, Z13