Stop this apples vs oranges false binary!

Economists, like fruit-sellers, have a fondness for metaphors. Yet, one of their favourites - 'comparing apples and oranges' - is a strange fruit, indeed. It's meant to signal futility, nay, the impossibility, of weighing dissimilar things. But anyone who has ever visited a grocer knows that apples and oranges have more in common than not. Both are, well, fruit. Both grow on trees. Both are round, juicy and usually overpriced. If the metaphor was meant to capture true incompatibility, why didn't economists just say 'chalk and cheese', or better still, 'pineapple and satellite'?

GDP comparisons, of late, have been dismissed as 'apples and oranges'. Yet, GDPs, like fruit, are almost invitations, even traps, to make you compare. Indeed, the idiom betrays a lack of imagination that must be corrected in these times of obsessive categorisation. Apples and oranges can be compared and, quite often, quite rightly are: sweetness, acidity, vitamin content, shelf life. Economists should go out fruit- and veggie-shopping more often, and not just for the purpose of arguing over wholesale price index vs consumer price index. In any case, Apples and Microsofts still remain the big divide, no matter what those newbies from the AI department might say. And, yes, the world deserves fresher idioms. Or else, we are liable to go bananas. Or should it be mangoes?