Books like Narrative Economics How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

The author claims there is a need on economic theory to understand not only metrics, but narratives that create reality and affect economic decisions. I think this is the only point where we agree.The first red flag for me is lack of references for Dawkins’ Memetics, nor Network and Web Science literature. Yes, epidemiology has been working on this for a long time, but there are at many other disciplines that have made important contributions to similar problems. The dismissal of those areas (intentional or not) is problematic.The second red flag is the reliance on ProQuest search (even worse, absolute numbers!) as the evidence offered. A few examples:The RSA algorithm, the original cryptography algorithm that may have started the Bitcoin revolution, dates back to 1977. ProQuest lists twenty-six articles that mention the RSA algorithm. But that number doesn’t begin to compare with the fifteen thousand–plus articles that mention the word Bitcoin.I don’t think we can measure the impact of RSA economically, but I’m pretty sure it has been much larger than Bitcoin. The fact that one is more popular than the other on some newspapers doesn’t reflect anything. In fact, this is in direct contradiction of the author’s Proposal #2 (more on that later).In the 1950s, even though the highest US income tax bracket was extremely high, ranging from 84% to 92%, ProQuest News & Newspapers produces only 33 stories with this phrase. In the decade of the 1980s, even though the highest income tax bracket was gradually being reduced from 70% to 28%, there were 520 ProQuest stories featuring the term. Since the 1980s, the epidemic of stories about the highest tax bracket has continued to grow.So basically the search of ONE PARTICULAR SUBSTRING should be evidence enough? Even assuming that it is valid evidence, are absolute numbers from the 50s comparable with the ones in the 80s? Why not at least (at least!) normalize them by some metric? I’m pretty sure there are other factors related to media publishing in those 30 years that one may want to consider when comparing citation numbers.Next issue are the proposition offered “about economic narratives that we can use to understand historically important narratives and to identify new narratives as they develop.”Proposition 1: Epidemics Can Be Fast or Slow, Big or Small. So basically they can be anything. This isn’t very useful.Proposition 2: Important Economic Narratives May Comprise a Very Small Percentage of Popular Talk. I think this is something valuable, which as I mentioned before, contradicts the claim about RSA/Bitcoin.Proposition 3: Narrative Constellations Have More Impact Than Any One Narrative, Sure, most likely, but since there is no formal definition of a narrative constellation….Proposition 4: The Economic Impact of Narratives May Change Through Time. Most likely, sure, I wouldn’t expect something different I guess.Proposition 5: Truth Is Not Enough to Stop False Narratives. Probably, “never let truth get in the way of a good story” is an old saying.Proposition 6: Contagion of Economic Narratives Builds on Opportunities for Repetition. Again, the author may be up to something interesting here, but he doesn’t elaborate.Proposition 7: Narratives Thrive on Attachment: Human Interest, Identity, and Patriotism. Probably, but this may apply to (almost?) any narrative, not economic onesFinally the proposals of adding a bunch of focus groups (including a database of sermons!) sounds a bit weird, but it may be the closest you can get of real evidence and maybe get some predicting power, but it seems a bit unrealistic (e.g., just consider privacy issues and its corresponding biases on sampling) .Overall this is a book with a good intention, lots of cherry-picked anecdotes, dubious data and without a proposal of how to actually tackle this analysis so much needed.