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Bill: We're talking with Dr Louisa Connors today, who is a Research Fellow at the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle, otherwise known as CoFEE. Her work has been in the field of computational stylistics and cognitive linguistics and language and more recently, she's been applying that knowledge to investigating how framing and language influences the way we understand economic ideas and concepts. So welcome, Louisa and I'm just wondering if you care to talk briefly about this work and how even if we are able to achieve a better understanding of the way in which the monetary system operates, there's still resistance provided by the mainstream through the way in which they use framing the way they frame their arguments and the types of language that they use.

Louisa: Hi, thanks for having me, Bill. So, yes, my work in cognitive linguistics has informed my understanding of MMT, particularly through the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who wrote a book called Metaphors We Live By. And so once you become more familiar with the concepts of MMT, you also tend to become more attentive to the types of metaphors that used to explain complex economic concepts.

And so when you hear common sense terms like budget repair or taxpayer money, if we unpack those a little bit, they all kind of relate back to the fundamentally metaphoric way that we reason and think. And so, Lakoff and Johnson talk about conceptual processes being fundamentally embodied, which means that we brains in bodies and we have perceptual processes that really guide our thinking and the way we construe concepts, what we prioritise, what we give prominence to.

And so things like ideas about equilibrium - so we bring to our understanding about budgets this idea that equilibrium is somehow important. And a cognitive linguist would sort of reason that that's partly related to how we experience being in our body. You know, being unbalanced can be dangerous or painful.

And so at some fundamental level, we bring these concepts to our understanding about budgets, money and other sort of economic concepts. And that can lead us into that sort of common sense thinking can lead us into some pretty erroneous ways of reasoning about what's good for us as actors in an economy. So what we have with MMT is a kind of two-fold problem because it's not enough for the arguments to be correct.

We're also sort of fighting this dominant paradigm that's underpinned by these very kind of basic ways of thinking about ourselves in the world and how we move through it. And so it's hard to get beyond that.

So we've got you know, when you hear things like there's a budget black hole or a ballooning budget deficit or a mushroom - mushrooming budget deficit, these are all sorts of concepts that make the budget sound like it's a it's an organic entity - that's not something that can be easily controlled when it's absolutely in the control of government to determine what its priorities are for spending.

And so our kind of task is not only a sort of an academic one, it's also quite it's a psychological one and about fundamentally about communication and how we think.

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