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.
