An accounting for words
by Nathan Schneider
What is the economic value of a word?
Social critic and Catholic priest Ivan Illich raised this question in his 1980 article “Vernacular Values” (later adapted for his book Shadow Work). “I do not really know how much is spent in the United States to make words,” he remarks. “But soon someone will provide us with the necessary statistical tables.”
To my knowledge these tables have yet to be produced. This may be surprising, given how the navel-gazing and status anxiety of academia have spurred widespread efforts to rank, track, and quantify the value of scholarly work. The U.S. Department of Education has an interactive “scorecard” for determining the potential worth of a degree from one university versus another. A Georgetown University report breaks the question down by majors. There are metrics out there for grant funding, publication rates, and job placement, but the production costs of new language is still TBD.
The production of words has social import. Arguably the recurring moral panics over “political correctness” and “wokeness” can be understood as reactions against a perceived excess in the supply of academic vocabularies in relation to mainstream culture’s demand. Perhaps the resulting backlash explains why the incoming vice president—a self-styled man of the people, despite being an elite-educated fellow himself—has declared universities “the enemy.”
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