Visual Aids Go Viral
Why did the napkin story go viral? Good storytelling seems at least partially
responsible. After the Wanniski story exploded, Laffer said that he could hardly
remember the event, which had taken place four years earlier.12 But Wanniski
was a journalist who sensed that he had the elements of a good story. The key
idea, as Wanniski presented it, is indeed punchy.
It may seem absurd to conclude that a story element of a drawing on a napkin
helped make the story go viral. But there is ample scientific evidence that
unusual visual stimuli aid memory and can help to make a narrative “iconic.” It’s
not that everybody remembers the napkin in the story. Rather, a small detail like
a graph drawn on a napkin might have raised the contagion rate at the beginning
of the narrative above the forgetting rate.
The Laffer curve embodies a notion of economic efficiency easy enough for
anyone to understand. Wanniski suggested, without any data, that we were on the
inefficient side of the Laffer curve. The drawing of the Laffer curve seemed to
suggest that cutting taxes would produce a huge windfall in national income. To
most quantitatively inclined people unfamiliar with economics, this explanation
of economic inefficiency was a striking concept, contagious enough to go viral,
even though economists protested that the United States was not actually on the
inefficient declining side of the Laffer curve.13 However, there may be some
situations in which the Laffer curve offers important policy guidance, notably
with taxes on corporate profits. A small country that lowers the corporate profits
tax rate below that of other countries may see companies moving their
headquarters to that country, enough to raise that country’s corporate tax
revenue.14 But an objective analysis of the Laffer curve did not lend itself to a
punchy story that could have stifled the Laffer epidemic and the relating of it to
personal income taxes. To tell the story really well, one must set the scene at a
fancy restaurant, with powerful Washington people and a napkin.
In the end, the Laffer curve napkin story may have gone viral because of the
sense of urgency and epiphany conveyed by the story: the idea was so striking,
so important, that an economics professor wanted to do something out of place at
a fancy restaurant to make government officials see its brilliance.
Ultimately, the story’s rich visual imagery helped it evolve from an economic
anecdote into a long-term memory. The visual detail of the napkin may have

lowered the speed at which people forgot the narrative, which could have helped
the epidemic penetrate a large fraction of the population. There is a lesson to be
learned here for those who want their stories to go viral: when authors want their
audience to remember a story, they should suggest striking visual images. In
ancient Rome, the senator Cicero advocated the use of this strategy, quoting the
scholar Simonides:
For Simonides, or whoever else invented the art, wisely saw, that those things
are the most strongly fixed in our minds, which are communicated to them,
and imprinted upon them, by the senses; that of all the senses that of seeing is
the most acute; and that, accordingly, those things are most easily retained in
our minds which we have received from the hearing or the understanding, if
they are also recommended to the imagination by means of the mental eye.15
Indeed, psychology and marketing journals have found that, at least in some
circumstances, bizarre mental images do serve as memory aids.16 For example,
Harry Lorayne, a memory-training specialist, has long advocated that people
who would like to improve their memory should try to form unusual, highly
visual mental images. His suggestion for people who mislay their keys:
As you drop your keys into the flowerpot, form a mental image of the two
vital entities—the keys and the place where you’re putting them. Make it a
silly or impossible image. Example: “See” a gigantic key growing in a
flowerpot.17
As neuroscience has shown us, long-term memory formation involves many
regions of the brain, including visual-image processing regions.18