For the last ten years many (local) policy makers and entrepreneurs have been fascinated with the economic potential of so-called creative industries and smart cities. This fascination was stirred by the conviction that creativity boosts the (local) economy. And because the urban economy is good for 70 percent of global GDP, and as more than half of the total world’s population lives in cities, creative industries are all the more relevant both socially and economically. This chapter explores a new approach to making sense of social and cultural qualities of cities in the new economy. This is the so-called Value based approach (VBA) with novel concepts, such as shared goods and practices, willingness-to-contribute (WTC) (Klamer, 2016), and, a key notion in our application, a commons, more precisely, the knowledge commons.

Until 1983, when Donald McCloskey invited literary criticism to the table of economics, the very notion of metaphor was virtually absent from economic discourse. Arguing in “The Rhetoric of Economics,” McCloskey proposed taking metaphor seriously. Since his article appeared in the Journal of Economic Literature, metaphor has acquired some currency among economists; its mention is no longer a show-stopping non sequitur.

The currency of the term “metaphor” does not, however, imply a general acceptance of its importance. On the contrary, suspicion and indifference still rule the day, if we may speak metaphorically. The average economist would be unable to locate “metaphor” in the economic lexicon. Many of our colleagues will grant the existence of metaphor, perhaps even conceding its ubiquity, but they then rejoin with the debater's bogey – “So what?”

The suspicion rests, we surmise, on the impression that metaphors introduce ambiguity. The imprecision created by ambiguous meaning is presumably fine for poets, but anathema for scientists. When McCloskey equates economics with poetry because it too relies on metaphors, scientifically minded economists are offended. “What matters is that we, as scientists, write down in a precise way what we mean. Precision is one of the standards by which we measure science.

The volume is a selection of the papers presented at the conference. Other presentations were:

Frank Hahn (Economics, Cambridge University): “On Some Common Mistakes in Economic Theorizing.”

Robert W. Clower (Economics, University of South Carolina): “Keynes and the Classicals Revisited.”

Gordon Winston: Comments on the papers by Hahn, Clower, and Folbre and Hartmann.

John Nelson (Political Science, University of Iowa): Comments on the papers by Hahn, Clower, and Folbre and Hartmann.

Zvi Griliches (Economics, Harvard University): Comments on paper by Denton.

Axel Leyonhufvud (Economics, UCLA): Comments on papers by Weintraub and Mirowski.

Donald Lavoie (Economics, George Mason University): Comments on papers by Bicchieri, Coats, and Wolff and Resnick.

“Economic Rhetoric and the General Public”: A panel discussion among David Warsh, Craufurd Goodwin (see their chapters in volume), Joe Kalt (Economics, Harvard University), Karen Arenson (the New York Times), and Robert Samuelson (Newsweek).

“Economic Rhetoric in the Political Arena”: A panel discussion among Galbraith, Keohane (see their papers in this volume), and Jeffrey Sachs (Economics, Harvard University).

We all know that, with a few exceptions, conferences are serious activities and play a critical role in our intellectual lives. But we do not necessarily know what that role is. Consequently our defense against criticism and parody is weak.

During this particular conference several people mentioned to me David Lodge's Small World. It was easy to understand why: The book makes fun of the world of literary critics, the very same world in which we as economists are getting interested, and especially of its conferences. “The modern conference,” Lodge writes in the warm-up to his story, “resembles the modern pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement.”

But David Lodge's Small World is fiction, its characters are literary (although rumors have it that Stanley Fish, who is the author of Chapter 3 in this book, stood model for Professor Zapp), and its descriptions of conferences are a caricature. Conferences are not as ludicrous as Lodge makes them out to be; not many will experience them as “long hours of compulsory sociability” and end up with “the familiar conference syndrome of bad breath, coated tongue, and persistent headache, that came from smoking, drinking and talking.”

In the early spring of 1986 about thirty economists, economic journalists, rhetoricians, philosophers, a political scientist, and a literary theorist gathered at Wellesley College for a conference on the Rhetoric of Economics. The composition of the group seemed unusual. Economists and humanists, after all, live in two different cultures and usually do not take each other's scholarly activities seriously. The conference could be an indication that times are changing.

The change is the emergence of a new “conversation” about economics that aspires to displace the dominant, positivistic view. The time is ripe, since positivism is losing its grip on the collective consciousness of economists and others as well. Its claim that “logic” and “facts” are the sole standards for the appraisal of economic theories does not appear to do justice to the complex reality in which economists operate. The new conversation attempts to alter our understanding of the reality by calling attention to the discursive aspects of economics, more particularly to its rhetorical forms.

The editors of the volume called the conference to explore the consequences of and to understand the resistance to this new point of view. We considered the participation of philosophers, rhetoricians, and literary theorists alongside economic practitioners to be critical. After all, now that we economists are becoming interested in our language and in our rhetorical devices, we would do well to pay attention to those scholars who have spent their professional lives thinking, writing, and talking about these subjects.

Exordium

“As civilized human beings,” wrote Michael Oakeshott in 1933, “we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.” In economics a few years ago a conversation about the conversation began.

Why it began is not clear. It might be interpreted as just carrying on an old conversation about how economists know (if they do), a methodological conversation started a century and more ago by John Stuart Mill. The new remark in the early 1980s was simply that economists use arguments beyond syllogism and measurement. The point of making it was not to undercut the mathematics in economics, as nonmathematicians sometimes wish they could. The point was merely to note that all economists, mathematical or not, use analogies, appeals to authority, and other rhetorical devices, using them as thoroughly as poets and preachers, though with less understanding of why they do so. So the recent conversation about conversation can be interpreted as more of the old stuff, an inward and philosophical affair (Klant 1985).

The new conversation might also be interpreted as arising from the battle of schools. This would be additional looking inward. Disagreements among economists are commonly exaggerated, even by economists themselves, yet it is true that the field had become by 1980 more warlike than fifteen years before. Everyone knows about the battle between Keynesians and monetarists (the tags mean something different now to politicians than they once meant to economists).