
I wish people would stop using economy as just a smart-sounding metaphor - maxwell
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/08/i-wish-people-w.html
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stcredzero
He tries to debunk the economy metaphor by pointing out that:

    
    
        1) Lots of people use the metaphor poorly
        2) If you take it literally, it doesn't work
    

Neither of those are particularly good. Maybe becoming hackneyed reduces the
value of a metaphor in terms of communications, but really says nothing about
it as an idea. And lots of metaphors don't work if you take them literally
because, you know, they're _metaphors_!

I dislike how this happened to the word "paradigm." Awareness of one's mental
models is quite valuable. And there are likely emergent effects akin to
markets in web communities, despite the difficulty in quantifying them.

