On the Language of Economics on NPR's Marketplace

Last December, I spoke with Sean McHenry for a segment on NPR’s Marketplace about the meanings behind the words economists use. While only a short excerpt aired today, the full exchange dove into the philosophical, historical, and political layers that underlie economic language, especially through the lens of Adam Smith and the evolution of economic thought.

We began with Smith, not the pop-icon version who supposedly preached markets above all else, but the Smith who drew from Newtonian mechanics to describe economic processes. Smith’s idea that market prices gravitate toward natural prices wasn’t just a metaphor, it was grounded in his belief that economic laws were as natural and immutable as the laws of physics. This analogy wasn't poetic fluff; it was the intellectual architecture of 18th century economics.

This matters because metaphors shape how we understand the world. Terms like natural rate of unemployment or neutral interest rate don’t just describe, they legitimize. They imply inevitability, naturalness, and neutrality, even when real-world consequences (job loss, mortgage spikes) are anything but neutral.

Smith's project was a materialist science concerned with the accumulation of wealth. For him the natural functioning of the economy did not lead to optimal outcomes. Still, the intervention of the mercantilist and feudal institutions impaired the natural process of wealth accumulation. After the marginalist revolution of the late 19th century, interventions affected the natural tendencies of the market to produce optimal outcomes. That is the world in which we still live, when it comes to economists metaphors. Meaning a world in which markets do produce optimal outcomes, unless there imperfections.

We also discussed the ideological undertones of terms like churn in labor market language. While economists may use it as a tidy description of movement in and out of jobs, for someone who's lost work, the term can feel like a euphemism that sanitizes real economic pain. It's this kind of language, precise, clinical, but emotionally distant, that can obscure the lived experience behind the data. The notion is that there might be pain, but in the long run that will not be a problem (Keynes was reacting to this notion with his famous quote about all being dead in the long run).

In my history of thought course at Bucknell, I walk students through how economic terminology evolved, from classical theories of value to modern utility and preference-based models. We interrogate the shift from political economy to economics, and what gets lost when we strip politics (class conflict) from the analysis. Even terms that seem neutral, like neutral interest rate or natural rate of unemployment, are packed with assumptions about how markets work, very often skewing issues of power, and distributional conflict.

Economics has long striven to present itself as a hard science, borrowing the language and posture of physics. But unlike physics, economics deals with entrenched political structures and it is harder to separate the ideological and analytical elements in a particular theory. The profession’s reliance on technical jargon and tidy models sometimes masks the messy, contested, and deeply political nature of the economy itself.

As one of the editors of the upcoming fourth edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, I’m part of a team trying to decolonize the dictionary, bringing in voices from underrepresented regions, grappling with the absence of concepts like power, and reassessing the dominance of certain Western-centric assumptions. I also it requires a return to some of the forgotten ideas of the classical political economy authors that made the political or socially conflictive element of the reproduction of society central to their analytical inquires (see my Palgrave lecture here).

Language is never just descriptive. It is to some extent normative. It tells us what to value, what to question, and what to accept as given. Political economy, at its best, can be a powerful tool for understanding and improving social conditions. But that requires constant reflection, not just on models and data, but on the words economists use, the histories economists tell, and the blind spots economists perpetuate.

You can catch the edited interview on NPR’s Marketplace with Sean McHenry here.