The difference between make and receive

We’re noting one of those little linguistic changes that are designed to deceive:

Covid jabs for billions of humans will earn their makers billions of dollars

The word “earn” usually means, with respect to corporate matters, the profit made, not the revenue:

We look at the drug firms – led by Pfizer and Moderna – that are set to profit most in an unprecedented global vaccination drive

The one thing the rest of the article does not even mention is profit.

Pfizer and Moderna, which are charging $30-plus per person for the required two shots in Europe and the US, will take the lion’s share. Analysts believe they could make more than $50bn in revenues collectively from their Covid jabs this year.

Everything is about revenue. And that’s not, entirely not, the same thing. Yet there’s - OK, to our eyes there is - a determined effort underway to blur this vital distinction. We see it when people talk about the taxation of Amazon for example. Reference is made to revenues - that hundred billion or whatever it is - and the tax bill on the profits. But the revenue isn’t the same as the earnings, the amount made. The comparison between tax paid on earnings and gross revenue misleads - deliberately we think - vastly more than it reveals.

We’ve been through all this before of course. Time was that poverty meant crustless waifs being stuffed up chimneys to avoid their actual starvation. Then came the idea of relative poverty - being in a household with less than 60% of median earnings - and over time that distinction of “relative” was dropped. Leading to people insisting, with an entirely straight face, that Poland has less child poverty than the UK, a place thrice as rich. That’s not how the actual, as opposed to relative, living standards of children work out in reality.

The general realisation that the word has changed meaning in such propaganda takes some time to arrive. By which time the work is done, all are convinced that not having the third pair of trainers like the kids down the road is the same as being crustless - or even to be stuffed up a chimney - and that revenue is the same as profits, that to receive money is the same as to make it.

We should recognise this for what it is, propaganda, not explanation.