[From IMTFI blog, 30 January 2013, with Kim Wilson] The book Metaphors We Live By makes a compelling case that metaphors are much more than mere linguistic artifacts or literary flourishes: they are conceptual devices through which we structure our understanding of the world around us. They permit us to relate fuzzier concepts which cannot be sharply defined (things such as love and peace) in terms of physical notions which we can experience more directly through our senses.
But the more
interesting metaphors relate to money as a substance, where it’s
the condition of the substance rather than its quantity that matters. We can
associate money with temperature: readily-available cash burns a hole
in your pocket. In international finance, speculative, short-term capital
flows are hot money. In West African community finance, l’argent
chaud (hot money) are funds constituted from clients’ resources, while l’argent
froid (cold money) is pumped in as credit from the government or a
bank. Hot money is closer to the heart, and thus hot money loans are always the
first to be repaid. Money can also have a tempo. Dubious traders can be out to make a fast buck, while economists will tell you that more readily convertible forms of money have higher velocity. Isn’t it remarkable how consistent the metaphors of money are with elementary physics. The temperature of a substance, its physical state and the speed of motion of its particles are all manifestations of the same thing: the amount of energy embedded in the substance. Long-term or ‘locked-up’ savings we think of as low-energy (cold, slow, solid) whereas ‘available’ money is higher energy (hot, fast, liquid).Could this implicit notion of energy refer to the psychological effort we need to expend daily to maintain the money, i.e. to not spend it? The process of freezing or slowing down money is about getting it out of our mind (and our grip) as much as we can. |
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