Education, for instance, is increasingly talked about as an individualized “investment in the future,” rather than a shared social good (Williams 2006; 2008), and, likewise, we are constantly being told that the fostering of children by parents and society at large is an investment. Books are being published that advise people to learn to invest time and affect in their relationships for later payback (see Martin 2003, 91–107). All these new meanings of investment are now being folded into common parlance: they elicit almost no response any more. And this is where metaphor gets dangerous: as George Lakoff (2003) and others have noted, metaphors function to hide social violence – they often work to disguise or normalize unstated or unacknowledged ideological assumptions.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 67