Something curious happened to the English language in the 1980s. The word “privatisation” appeared in just 0.0000012% of all published words in 1940—barely a whisper in the literary landscape. By its peak, this had surged to 0.0008%—a 670-fold increase. “Incentivise” increased by 780 percent between 1940 and 2021. These numbers may seem tiny, but in the vast ocean of published language, they represent a seismic shift.
An analysis of 200 years of published text reveals that the Reagan-Thatcher era marked the moment when economic jargon escaped the academy and colonised everyday discourse. What philosophers had suspected, data can now prove: market logic didn’t just reshape policy—it rewired how we think.
Building on Sandel’s Foundation
Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel used newspaper databases to track how market thinking had gradually invaded domains once governed by different values. We began treating education as “human capital investment,” relationships as “networking opportunities,” and civic duties as “incentive problems.” But we can now take his approach much further.
Google’s digitisation of millions of books allows us to track the spread of ideas through language with unprecedented precision. Using our own collection of market-oriented terms and extending it with large language models, we built a comprehensive vocabulary of neoconservative economic language. We then downloaded Google’s unigram data—tracking individual word frequencies across centuries—to watch economic thinking go viral across two centuries of published text.
From Vienna to Silicon Valley
The story begins long before Reagan and Thatcher. In the 1920s and 1930s, Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek developed the intellectual foundations for market-oriented thinking. Their ideas migrated to America, taking root at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman. The “Chicago Boys”—Friedman’s students—first tested these theories in Pinochet’s Chile during the 1970s, providing a real-world laboratory for market reforms.
When Reagan and Thatcher came to power, they weren’t improvising. They were implementing a mature intellectual framework that had been decades in the making. Our data captures this moment when fringe academic ideas became mainstream political vocabulary.
The Great Linguistic Takeover
The timeline reveals the full arc of this transformation. From 1800 to 1980, economic terminology appeared sporadically in published literature. Then came the inflection point. Market-speak didn’t just increase—it exploded. Words that were virtually non-existent became commonplace, spreading through business schools, management consultancies, and eventually everyday conversation.
The pattern extends beyond the Reagan-Thatcher era. The language continued spreading through the 1990s and 2000s, surviving the end of the Cold War and the rise of “Third Way” politics. Even progressive politicians adopted market vocabulary, suggesting this wasn’t merely partisan rhetoric but a deeper shift in how we frame social problems.
Narrative Economics and the Limits of Culturomics
Nobel laureate Robert Shiller’s theory of “narrative economics” explains how economic ideas spread like viruses through society. Popular stories about how the economy works can become self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping behaviour and policy for generations. The rise of market vocabulary represents narrative economics in its purest form—a successful meme that colonised our collective imagination.
This approach builds on the “culturomics” movement that became popular over a decade ago, using large text corpora to track cultural trends. However, as corpus linguists have shown, such analyses have important limitations. We cannot be certain about the direction of causality: does a book cause the rise in popularity of a given term, or does the book simply follow existing social trends? The data shows correlation, not causation.
Still, the patterns are striking. Today, we “leverage” friendships, “optimise” our morning routines, and discuss “return on investment” for university degrees without batting an eyelid. The language has become so embedded that we barely notice it anymore.
When Frameworks Collide
Sometimes this linguistic toolkit proves remarkably effective. Carbon trading markets emerged from economic theory and have become essential tools for climate policy. Kidney exchange programmes save lives by applying market logic to organ allocation. The vocabulary of economics can solve problems that moral exhortation cannot.
But the same framework can distort other domains beyond recognition. When schools become “educational service providers” and students become “consumers,” something important gets lost. When we treat human connections as networking opportunities to be optimised, the very meaning of friendship changes.
Reclaiming Democratic Discourse
As Sandel observed, democracy depends on our ability to articulate different values and debate competing visions of the good life. Market logic represents one important set of values—efficiency, choice, innovation—but it shouldn’t be the only vocabulary available to us.
We have values beyond market efficiency: justice, solidarity, tradition, beauty, community. The challenge isn’t to reject market thinking entirely, but to return to open and democratic debates about when and where different values should apply. We need to be able to articulate why some things shouldn’t be for sale, why some relationships can’t be optimised, and why some problems require solutions that markets cannot provide.
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