Metaphors Analysis Essay Example for Free

Metaphors Analysis EssayEconomists have an image of practicality and worldliness non sh ared by physicists and poets. Some economists have earned this image. Others myself and many a(prenominal) of my colleagues here at Chicagohave non. Im not surely whether you leave alone take this as a confession or a boast, but we are essentially story-tellers, creators of suffer-believe economic systems. Rather than try to explain what this story-telling activity is near and why I call back it is a usefuleven an essentialactivity, I thought I would fair(a) tell you a story and permit My changes you make of it what you give care. story has a point I want to understand the connection between in the funds supply and economic economic crisiss.One way to demonstrate that I understand this connectionI think the further in reality convincing way would be for me to engineer a falling off in the United States by manipulating the U. S. money supply. I think I know how to do this, tho ugh Im not absolutely sure, but a real virtue of the democratic system is that we do not look kindly on race who want to use our lives as a laboratory. So I go away try to make my depression approximatelywhere else. The location I have in mind is an old-fashioned amusement jetroller coasters, fun house, hottish dogs, the works.I am thinking of Kennywood honey oil in Pittsburgh, where I lived when my children were at the optimal age as amusement park companions a beautiful, turn-of-the-century place on a bluff overlooking the Monongahela River. If you have not seen this particular park, substitute one with which you are familiar, as I want you to try to visualize how the prove I am going to describe would actually work in practice. 2 Kennywood Park is A useful location for my purposes because it is an entirely independent pecuniary system. One cannot the park. At the gate, visitors use U. S. dollars then enter the park and spend the tickets.Rides spend U. S. dollars inside t o purchase tickets and inside are priced at so many tickets per ride. Ride operators collect these tickets, and at the end of each day theyare cashed in for dollars, like chips in a casino. For obvioua reasons, business in park fluctuates Sundays are big days, July 4 is even bigger. On some concessions I call up each ride in the park to be independently operatedthither is some flexibility an extra person can be called in to help take tickets or to speed slew getting on and off the ride, on short- circular if the day is unexpectedly big or with advanced notice if it is predictable.If business is disappointingly slow, an operator will let some of his help leave early. So gross national product in the park ( come up tickets fluctuate from want to call a spent) and employment (the number of man hours worked) will one day to the next due to fluctuations in demand. Do we slow daya Monday or a Tuesday, saya depression? Surely not. By an economic depression we mean something that ought not to happen, something pathological,not normal seasonal or unremarkable ups and downs. This, I imagine,is how the park works. (I say imagine because I am bonny making most of this up as I go along. ).Technically, Kennywood Park is a fixed exchange rate system, since its central bankthe cashiers office staff at the gate stands do to exchange local currencyticketsfor foreign currencyUS dollarsat a fixed rate. In this economy, in that respect is an obvious sense in which the number of tickets in circulation is economically irrelevant. No-onecustomer or concessioner really cares ab tabu the number of tickets per ride except insofar as these prices reflect U. S. dollars per ride. If the number of 3 tickets per U. S. dollar were twofold from 10 to 20, and if the prices of all rides were doubled in terms of tickets6 tickets per roller coaster ride kind of of 3and if everyone understood that these changes had occurred, it just wouldnot make any important difference.Such a doubling of the money supply and of prices would amount to a 100 percent inflation in terms of local currency, but so what? Yet I want to show you that changes in the quantity of moneyin the number of tickets in circulationhave the capacity to induce depressions or exposits in this economy (just as I think they do in reality). To do so, I want to imagine subjecting Kennywood Park to an entirely operational taste.Think of renting the suitable compensation, and taking office Neither the operators of park from its owners for one Sunday, for over the functions of the cashiers concessions nor the customers are to. be informed of this. Then, with no advance warning to anyone inside the park, and no communication to them as to what is going on, the cashiers are instructed for this one day to give 8 tickets per dollar instead of 10. What will happen? We can imagine a categorization of reactions. Some customers, discouraged or angry, will turn around and go headquarters. Others, coming to the pa rk with a dollar budget fixed by Mom, will just buy 80 percent of the tickets they would have bought otherwise.Still others will shell out 20 percent more dollars and behave as they would have in the absence of this change in exchange rates. I would have to know much more than I do close to Kennywood Park patrons to judge how many would fall into each of these categories, but it is pretty clear that no-one will be bring forth to take more tickets than if the experiment had not taken place, many will buy fewer, and thus that the total number of tickets in circulationthe money supply of this amusement park economy willtake a drop beneath what it otherwise would have been on this Sunday. Now how does all of this look from the point of view of the operator of a ride or the guy selling hot dogs?Again, there will be a variety of reactions. In general, most operators will notice that the park seems kind of empty, for a Sunday, and that customers dont seem to be using up like they usua lly do. More time is being spent on freebies, the river view or a walk through the gardens. Many operators take this personally. Those who were worried that their ride was becoming passe get excess confirmation. Those who thought they were just starting to become popular, and had had thoughts of adding some capacity, begin to wonder if they had perhaps become over-optimistic.On many concessions, the extra employees hired to deal with the expected Sunday crowd are sent home early. A gloomy, depressed mood What I have The reduction in and employment. settles in. done, in short, is to engineer a depression in the park. the quantity of money has led to a reduction in real produce And this depression is indeed a kind of pathology. Customers are arriving at the park,eager to spend and enjoy themselves. Concessioners are ready and waiting to serve them. By introducing a glitch into the parks monetary system, we have prevented (not physically, but just as effectively) buyers and sellers fr om getting together to consummate mutually advantageous trades..That is the end of my story. Rather than offer you some of my opinions about the nature and causes of depressions in the United States, I simply made a depression and let you watch it unfold. I hope you found it convincing on its own terms that what I express would happen in the park as the result of my manipulations would in fact happen. If so, then you will 5 agree that by increasing the number of tickets per dollar we could as easily have engineered a boom Sunday after our manipulations boom in the park. But we could not, clearly, engineer a Sunday by this method.Our experiment worked only because caught everyone by surprise. We could have avoided the depression by leaving things alone, but we could not use monetary manipulation to engineer a permanently higher level of prosperity in the park. The clarity with which these effect can be seen is the key advantage of operating in simplified, fictional worlds. The disa dvantage, it must be conceded, is that we are not really arouse in understanding and preventing depressions in hypothetical * amusement parks. We are interested in our own, vastly more complicated . society.To apply the knowledge we have gained about depressions in Kennywood Park, we must be willing to argue by analogy from what we know about one situation to what we would like to know about another, quite different situation. And, as we all know, the analogy that one person finds persuasive, his live may well find ridiculous. Well, that is why honest people can disagree. can do about it, except keep trying to tell better I dont know what one and better stories, to take into account the raw material for better and more instructive analogies. How else can we free ourselves from the limits of historical experience so as to discover ways in which our society can operate better than it has in the last(prenominal)?In any case, operating much of that is what economists do. We are sto rytellers, the time in worlds of make believe. We do not find the realm of desire and ideas is an alternative to, or a retreat practical reality. On the contrary, it is the only way we have found think seriously about reality. that from, to 6 In a way, there is nothing more to this method than maintaining the conviction (which I know you have after fouryears at Chicago) that imagination and ideas matter.. I hope you can do this in follow. It is fun and interesting and, really, there is alternative. Robert E. Lucas, Jr. celestial latitude 9, 1988 the years that no practical.