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ProQuest News & Newspapers (proquest. com), which allows online search of newspaper articles and advertisements back to the 1700s, shows that the phrase go viral (and variations going viral, went viral, and gone viral) first appeared as an epidemic in newspapers only around 2009, typically in connection with stories about the Internet. The associated term viral marketing goes back only a little further, to 1991, as the name of a small company in Nagpur, India. Today, as a ProQuest search reveals, the phrase going viral itself has gone viral. Google Ngrams (books.google. com/ngrams), which
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Trivia - Going viral
We need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economic theory. Otherwise, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change, as well as a crucial element for economic forecasting. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we do not fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.
To uderstand the changes in the economy and economic nehaviorus we need to understand the changes is popular narratives.
(1) the word-of-mouth contagion of ideas in the form of stories and (2) the efforts that people make to generate new contagious stories or to make stories more contagious. First and foremost, I want to examine how narrative contagion affects economic events.
The word narrative is often synonymous with story. But my use of the term reflects a particular modern meaning given in the Oxford English Dictionary: “a story or representation used to give an explanatory or justificatory account of a society, period, etc.”
Definition of narrative.
Viral narratives need some personality and story.
Contagion is strongest when people feel a personal tie to an individual in or at the root of the story, whether a stock personality type or a real celebrity.
Narrative economics demonstrates how popular stories change through time to affect economic outcomes, including not only recessions and depressions, but also other important economic phenomena.
There have been, according to a Fathom Consulting study, 469 recessions (defined as a decline in a country’s GDP over a year) in 194 countries forecasted since 1988 by the International Monetary Fund in its biannual World Economic Outlook. In only 17 of these did they forecast a recession in the preceding year. They predicted recessions that did not occur 47 times.
In short, as Koopmans pointed out, traditional economic approaches fail to examine the role of public beliefs in major economic events—that is, narrative.
advance their science by developing and incorporating into it the art of narrative economics.
Quotes on science and art.
Narrative economics, the study of the viral spread of popular narratives that affect economic behavior, can improve our ability to anticipate and prepare for economic events. It can also help us structure economic institutions and policy.
An economic narrative is a contagious story that has the potential to change how people make economic decisions,
Definition - narrative.
The beginnings of Bitcoin date to 2008, when a paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” signed by Satoshi Nakamoto, was distributed to a mailing list. In 2009, the first cryptocurrency, called Bitcoin, was launched based on ideas in that paper.
Beginnings of Bitcoin.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and others. Proudhon described anarchism in 1840 as follows: To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
Definition of anarchism.
In the Internet age, people’s willingness and ability to work together with new technology—in new frameworks that do not rely on government, on conventional profit, or on lawyers—have surprised many of us. For example, wikis, notably Wikipedia, encourage cooperation among large numbers of anonymous people to produce amazing information repositories. Another success story is the Linux operating system, which is open-source and distributed for free.
Willingness of large group of people to work together within conventional profit.
Fear about your future is more an existential fear about not being needed.
Bitcoin has no nationality, giving it a democratic and international appeal. Inherent in its pan-national narrative is the idea that no government can control it or stop it.
In contrast, old-fashioned paper money, typically with historical engravings of famous men in a country’s history, suggests an obsolete nationalism, something for losers. Paper currency resembles little national flags in a way; it is a symbol of one’s nationality.
Having a Bitcoin wallet makes the owner a citizen of the world and in some sense psychologically independe...
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consilience, coined by philosopher of science William Whewell in 1840 and popularized by biologist E. O. Wilson in 1994, means the unity of knowledge among the differing academic disciplines, especially between the sciences and the humanities.
Definition of Consilience.
Unfortunately, academic disciplines tend to become insular.
According to Ronald B. Tobias (1999), in all of fiction there are only twenty master plots: “quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, revenge, the riddle, rivalry, underdog, temptation, metamorphosis, transformation, maturation, love, forbidden love, sacrifice, discovery, wretched excess, ascension, and descension.” Christopher Booker (2004) argues that there are only seven basic plots: “overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.”
the human brain seems wired to respond to stories that lead to thinking in analogies.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), more than a hundred nongovernmental organizations, and individuals who risked their lives to lower the contagion in Africa.
(the word quarantine derives from the Latin word for forty).
Trivia.
One such super-spreader was Mary Mallon, “Typhoid Mary,” who a century ago spread typhoid fever to at least 122 people over an interval of years.
Trivia.
narrative epidemics really mimic disease epidemics.
the epidemic first became visible more than a decade after the model was introduced, a phenomenon that we also see in the medical-epidemic framework, where epidemics may go unobserved for a while after very small beginnings.
The number of cases may be growing steadily percentage-wise, but the disease fails to be widely noticed until the number of cases hits a certain threshold.
A key proposition of this book is that economic fluctuations are substantially driven by contagion of oversimplified and easily transmitted variants of economic narratives.
Just as the world experiences co-epidemics of diseases, where two or more diseases interact positively with each other, we also see co-epidemics of narratives in which the narratives are perceived as sharing a common theme, such as case studies that illuminate a political argument, creating a picture in the mind that is hard to see if one focuses on just one of the narratives.
large-scale economic narratives are often composed of a constellation of many smaller narratives. Each smaller narrative may suggest a part of a larger story, but we need to see the full constellation to discern the full theme.
Some narrative constellations may at their peak infect only a small fraction of the population, but if that fraction of the population curtails its spending substantially, the narrative may matter a lot.
In addition to a constellation of narratives, there is a confluence of narratives that may help drive economic events. By a confluence, I mean a group of narratives that are not viewed as particularly associated with one another but that have similar economic effects at a point in time and so may explain an exceptionally large economic event.
If we want to know why an unusually large economic event happened, we need to list the seemingly unrelated narratives that all happened to be going viral at around the same time and affecting the economy in the same direction.
It is difficult to state accurately or to quantify the reason a few economic narratives go viral while most fail to do so. The answer lies in a human element that interacts with economic circumstances. Beyond some simple and predictable regularities, a network of human minds sometimes acts almost like a random number generator in selecting which narratives go viral.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.
It’s all about stories.
the narrative is a uniquely human phenomenon, not shared by any other species. Indeed, some have suggested that stories distinguish humans from animals, and even that our species be called Homo narrans (Fisher, 1984), Homo narrator (Gould, 1994), or Homo narrativus (Ferrand and Weil, 2001).
Stories are unique to Humans.
How is it that other animals learn fundamental survival skills, such as fearing specific predators? Experiments have shown that monkeys are genetically predisposed to fear snakes, and birds are genetically predisposed to be afraid of hawks.
Genetic predisposition of animals to predators.
The words narrative and story are often used interchangeably. But according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, a narrative is “a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values.”15 So a narrative is a particular form of a story, or of stories, suggesting the important elements and their significance to the receiver.
Narrative is a form of story.
The human tendency to form simple narratives around even the most complex chains of events infects even the most analytical minds.
Historian Hayden White has emphasized the distinction between a historical narrative and a historical chronicle, which merely lists sequences of events: The demand for closure in the historical story is a demand, I suggest, for moral meaning, a demand that sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama.
Economists have tended to write theories as if a benevolent dictator can implement a specific plan to achieve the greatest social welfare.
In one sense it is rational to copy the behavior of apparently successful people, even if one does not see any logic in the behavior.
“When in doubt, imitate.”
On the contrary, following scripts set by others often looks like quite stupid behavior.
the example of wheeled suitcases.
Story about the wheeled suitcase.
Experimental evidence shows that the success of individual creative works depends on how people assess the reactions of others who are observing the work.
What's needed for things to go viral.
Major things happen because of seemingly irrelevant mutations in narratives that have slightly higher contagion rates, slightly lower forgetting rates, or first-mover effects that give one set of competing narratives a head start.
there is ample scientific evidence that unusual visual stimuli aid memory and can help to make a narrative “iconic.”
