Certain Habits

BRICs. The term is familiar to anyone who, like me, has read a lot of financial news or investing reports in the last ten years.

The acronym was coined by a Goldman Sachs banker named Jim O’Neill in a 2001 report the firm published predicting that the balance of global economic power would shift inexorably this century into those four countries.

An interesting Financial Times article chronicles the rise of the term and the effect of the BRICs phenomenon on O’Neill. In the introduction it makes an important point:

To some critics, the fuss about Brics is overblown. The term is hype, spin, from a bank and banking industry accustomed to disguising such guff as genuinely new ideas and concepts – the better to profit from them. “Brics is really just marketing – it’s nonsense!” says Charles Dumas, a London-based economist who disputes many elements of the Brics concept, such as the idea that these countries will keep growing inexorably into the future. Others are more cynical still, arguing that Goldmans Sachs has used the concept to extend its global power, and thus turbo-charge its formidable profit-making machine. O’Neill denies this latter accusation. “I really believe in this idea of Brics, that this idea can make the world a better place – it’s what drives me,” he says.

But even if Brics is self-interested spin, such spin – an idea in itself, really – can sometimes take on a life of its own, beyond what its creators expect or even hope for. By creating the word Brics, O’Neill has redrawn powerbrokers’ cognitive map, helping them to articulate a fundamental shift of influence away from the western world. And if you believe that the way humans think and speak not only reflects reality, but can shape its future path too, then this Brics tag has itself come both to reflect and drive the change – albeit from some unlikely beginnings.

This seems right—obvious, even—to me. The right word or phrase can concentrate thought, take the strands of hopes, fears, facts, myths that circulate in the public consciousness and focus them, make them cohere, and in drawing them together, give shape to our understanding of the world.

Names have this power in two ways. First, without the right language, we are incapable to thinking clearly about a phenomenon, especially one as diffuse as economic and political ascendancy. We can’t think about the things as a non-random phenomenon unless and until we have words capable of consciously expressing the thought.

Second, the name allows us to communicate the idea in a discrete chunk. BRICs isn’t just an acronym for four countries. It has become the container for a complex set of assumptions, arguments, facts, hopes and fears. It’s naming a thing that enables us to talk about, extend and debate those ideas.