levyinstitute.org [PDF] · #economics
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
The framing of an argument---the premises that you start from---is probably more important than the argument itself. Just as one should never try to argue for atheism by assuming that the Bible is the true word of God, one should not argue for progressive policy by starting from the libertarians' mythology of money as a more efficient form of barter.
geneusutwerk · 4345 days ago · link ·
Okay I don't get it, why are they using the term meme? I started and kept getting distracted because they keep seeming to use meme to mean frame, and then I got to the third page "However, I also know from experience that “truth” doesn’t automatically trump myth.
George Lakoff has brilliantly explained how our minds work: using metaphors—memes—to
understand the world" and wtf? meme? metaphor? I also find it odd that they link all this meme stuff to George Lakoff, I don't know him well, but meme's originate from Richard Dawkins and I couldn't find references to meme's on George Lakoff's wikipedia page and some googling didn't discover anything really concrete except for references to him and memes at the same time, but no writings from him about memes. What am I missing?
–
sphericalvoxel · 4345 days ago · link ·
Yes, there should have been a citation of Dawkins, but if you'll remember, Dawkins coined the term "meme" to refer to a packet of information or knowledge. So in using the term meme, Wray is referring to the cultural ideas surrounding money, and certainly, a particular bundle of money-memes have proven to be very successful at defining people's intuitions about money. To connect it to Lakoff's work, Wray is equating the memes of money to Lakoff's ideas concerning how metaphors inform our ways of thinking. That is, as he says, the memes are metaphors, and vice versa.