STREET DOGS: Markets spawn metaphors of mass destruction
As everything around us grows more complex, so does the need for metaphors
John Maynard Keynes thought professional money managers were playing something akin to an intricate guessing game in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from 100 photographs that they think are the likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem in the same way.
Much of Keynes’s lasting popularity comes from his use of metaphors. Metaphors are the basic building blocks of how we think and communicate with one another, a way of reducing complex concepts into something that is easier to grasp. We make sense of the world by seeing how one part of it relates to and is reflected in another...
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