Can economic euphemisms be bubblewrap for society?

As a follow-up to my earlier post on euphemism, I want to direct you to an excellent Slate article by Daniel Gross called “Bubblespeak.” While the burst bubble that was our economy has brought an abundance of terms to the forefront––TARP, toxic assets, securitization–it has also created an environment in which Orwellian doublespeak can flourish.

In his humorous but unfortunately serious article, Gross demonstrates how “toxic assets” became “troubled assets,” as if we could send them to reform school and they’d be all right. Just calling them assets seems to be overpromising. He writes about past mistakes becoming “legacy debt,” trouble that executives inherited but seemed to have had no hand in.  And so on.

I wonder if this softening and twisting of reality is simply a manipulative tool of the powerful, or if we as Americans or even as human beings actually prefer it. I guess it’s a little of both. When we call junk bonds “high yield bonds” or call the widespread infection of debt “securitization,” or call subprime loans “nonprime,” we are lying to others, for sure. But aren’t we also telling people what they want to hear? Is there not some complicity among those who want to feel better about themselves and their decisions?

Certainly, when we (or our government) call worthless mortgages “troubled assets,” we are lying to ourselves. But now that all has been revealed, maybe it’s not so bad. Perhaps we are merely softening the blow, protecting ourselves with a kind of verbal bubblewrap, and, out of necessity, making our challenges seem surmountable and our darker days a little lighter.

Senator JFK once made fun of Eisenhower by attributing this false quote to him:  “We are now at the end of the beginning of the upturn of the downturn.” These days, that actually sounds pretty good.