Mixing metaphors out of their Box

After all, rising tides don’t trickle down.

• Greed is good,
• Markets are sufficient,
• Governments are suspect.

Economists mix two metaphors to promote this dogma, that a rising tide lifts all boats, rich and poor alike, and that the wealth of the rich trickles down to the rest. Go tell that to the poor and the rest, such as a beleaguered family that can’t pay its mortgage.

These win-win promises may have had some credibility when some societies were better balanced, but since capitalism triumphed after 1989—and greed has taken over—the tidal waves have been swamping the dinghies anchored below, while the yachts sail merrily along.

I assure you that rising tides don’t trickle down. But people do—to misery.

So how about these two metaphors instead.

First, the parable about the frog that, put in hot water, will jump out, but put in cold water that is heated up, will stay and boil to death. Second, that this frog is in the final stage of slavery, which is when you no longer realize that you are a slave. Think of us as being in the final stage of imbalance, when we no longer recognize balance, while we boil to death in our climate. Do we realize the extent to which we have become the slaves of our excess production for excess consumption, with all of its waste and warming? Edward Abbey put it perfectly with another metaphor: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

As one view of human nature, this economic dogma makes some sense. As the view of human nature, it is nonsense.

• Greed may be a natural human trait, but carried to excess, it ravages human society, not least in the income disparities that are now tearing our democracies apart.
• We certainly need markets, in their place—the competitive marketplace—but not for services that must function as callings. Now, for example, mercenary markets are abusing our health care.  (Are you prepared to “let the buyer beware" when you need a surgical operation?)
• And those societies that treat government as suspect get the governments they deserve—ineffective at best, corrupt and chaotic at worst.

To reverse another metaphor popular in economics: Adam Smith’s invisible hand of competition in the marketplace has become a visible claw of power in the public place.

© Henry Mintzberg 2024, with a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. This has been prepared for a pamphlet that I am writing, under the title “For the sake of survival.”