George Orwell wrote his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ a year after the end of the Second World War. He showed how the ‘debasement of language’ corrupts thought and, in the process, corrupts our politics. The standard view is that economic and political causes drive the decline of language. But the reality, as Orwell suggests, is that the decline of language may itself also be the cause of many political and economic problems. As he put it: ‘A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.’
Orwell was mostly talking about politics, but economics suffers from the same debasement of language. Indeed, Orwell himself understood this point well. In his novel ‘1984’, where language is tightly controlled to limit thoughtcrime, Winston Smith reads a children’s history textbook which asserts that in the time before Big Brother’s revolution: ‘the capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave’. Orwell was a fierce critic of capitalism, but he wanted to debate it on its merits, and saw that such conversations would be impossible in a world where the very word had been made synonymous with slavery.
Before engaging in any economic debate, we should first ask whether the language itself has already been debased. A central example in British politics is the term ‘cost of living’. No. 10 is preparing for a ‘cost of living crisis’ in the context of the Iran war, and Zack Polanski recently said that ‘tackling the cost of living crisis’ is one of the three planks of his plan. But the term itself is a debasement of language. Why? Because it unconsciously directs attention to ‘cost’. From an economic perspective, this framing nudges people towards a cost-push theory of inflation; but cost-push inflation is a theory of short-term shocks, whereas in the UK the real problem was inflation that became persistent and broad-based.
That may sound technical, but this debased language encourages false theories like greedflation: the idea that prices rise because of greed and price gouging. And the implied conclusion is that businesses cannot lower costs, so government must step in – whether through price controls or direct provision. This is precisely where economics and language intersect: the wording of a debate shapes its conclusions.
Then there is the addition of the word ‘crisis’: ‘cost of living crisis,’ ‘climate crisis’. Not only have you made your case, but you have also made it urgent. One may believe these situations are crises or not, but the language itself pushes public opinion toward immediate action. Market solutions take time, whereas state intervention appears decisive, even if it merely replaces one problem with another, often beyond the next election cycle. The language, in effect, implies that urgent state action is necessary and that markets are insufficient.
Milton Friedman compared inflation to alcoholism, noting that both produce good effects first and bad effects later, making them addictive and hard to cure. Replace inflation with other unnecessary government interventions in the market, and the logic is similar. The word ‘crisis’ makes us short-term thinkers, and it is quite appealing to politicians. For Keynesians, ‘in the long run we are all dead’; for politicians, in the long run we are not in office.
Finally, there is the word ‘free’: free healthcare, free schools, free breakfasts. A petition is currently collecting signatures to ban government bodies from describing taxpayer-funded services as ‘free’, and rightly so. The term suggests that the government possesses some kind of costless resource. The psychological effect is crucial: if government can provide goods without cost, why would anyone support reducing public spending? If, instead, we used ‘taxpayer-funded’ rather than ‘free’, people might rethink their economic assumptions.
Instead, the term ‘free’ remains one of the most misleading in modern politics. The fact that someone else pays does not make something free; worse, it disperses responsibility and weakens incentives and efficiency. The Times recently reported that the NHS has become the second-worst in the developed world for avoidable deaths. Free at the point of use, but you may pay the price with your life.
In the battle of ideas, winning debates is not enough. If we do not pay attention to language, we may find ourselves playing on our opponent’s ground without even realising it. That could help explain why consecutive Conservative governments struggled to deliver economic growth: the debate has been conducted on the opponent’s terms. And when conservatism lacks original ideas of its own, it becomes merely a way to slow the rate of change – rather than to change its direction.
Columns are the author’s own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.
