The aim of this article is to explore to what extent the rule of economics commonly known as Gresham's law (“bad money drives out good money”) can be extrapolated to verbal language (“bad concepts drive out good concepts”). Consequently, the goal of this article is twofold. First, for Gresham's law to be applied simultaneously to money and language, its unfortunate (“good”/“bad”) and obscure (“drives out”) wording should be clarified. Second, one should identify the contexts in which the validity of the law could be assessed best, and run a very preliminary test. For this purpose, the circulation of the adjective (“hard”, “strong”, or “stable” in Russian) in the word combination (“hard currency”) in use in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s was scrutinized.
It is customary to associate the twentieth century communication with extraordinary high informational content setting it apart from interaction in the earlier, less technologically and socially 'advanced' periods of history. Departing from systems theory, this article disputes the maximization of efficiency in informational exchanges within the societies in question (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and 'New Deal'-USA), noting in particular the vulnerability of highly unstable totalitarian regimes to informational and social explosions. After discussing general mechanisms or reducing communicative complexity (from linguistic redundancy to ritualistic behaviour), the article briefly summarizes the extended use of these techniques in interactions between 'totalitarian' leaders and their followers, and offers statistical data contrasting low informational content of followers' feedback to the speeches of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler to the corresponding data on the 'democratic' president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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