Competitiveness, debt hair cuts, rebalancing, debt ceiling, zombie banks, deleveraging, automatic stabalizers, extensive margin, hyperbolic discounting (1, 2), Oops (3), price caps, minimum wage…

Economic jargon is something more than just a set of weird words used by weird economy people.

They are a tool of re-defining society.

As Orwell very intuitively put it in 1984… “We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone […] It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. […] In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it“… (4)