Narrative Economics

I'd stumbled across this by way of the LSE podcast which is excellent if you can't get your fill of meaty academic economics, social, and policy discussions and (almost always) solid Q&A.

Shiller is eminently credible in the economics field, and was awarded the Nobel in economics in 2013. He's the co-creator of the Case-Shiller housing index (particularly commented on about a decade ago).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Shiller

For well over a century, the trend in economics has been toward mathematical and quantitative models. Shiller's focus here on narratives is in sharp counterpoint to the mainstream viewpoint. His focus on epidemiological characteristics of narratives is straight-up brain-candy to me.

For those interested in the audio:

Narrative Economics [Audio] LSE: Public lectures and events Duration: 1:17:55 Published: Tue, 10 Sep 2019 18:30:00 GMT Episode: http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/pub...

Media: https://media.rawvoice.com/lse_publiclecturesandevents/richm...

Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/279428154

Speaker(s): Professor Robert Shiller | Join us to hear from Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller who will in this lecture talk about his new book which ar...

Looks really interesting, but in the first paragraph of the introduction:

> A recession, for example, is a time when many people have decided to........express support for fiscally conservative government.

What? I'm not sure how this sentence is showing up below words like Yale and NBER at the top of this paper.

The overall idea that stories can drive recessions has clearly happened: a population buys in to the story that profits are derived from exploitation, they abolish profits, then a major recession hits as the economy ceases functioning.

He does touch upon the "profiteer" narrative as a possible source of the 1920 recession, but skips how that same basic narrative would play a major role in shaping the USSR.

He speaks of the narratives of the 2008 financial collapse, but only in terms of how people referenced The Great Depression. What about the narrative that everybody should be able to buy a house, which led to lower lending standards, which led to horrible practices on the back end to try and salvage the the bad loans being written, which led to a global recession.

This is an interesting microeconomics paper about a new field or theory of economics, unsure which. Naming itself is probably the first step in successful application towards propagating itself. Doesn’t mention within the paper anything about memetics.

On a minor note, minds in general seem better geared to remembering stories, e.g. mnemonics.