Celebrities, Quips, and Politics
Though the Laffer curve epidemic may have played a role in the election of
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, other narratives were surely influential,
such as this quip by Reagan:
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short
phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops
moving, subsidize it.23
Reagan used these words in a 1986 speech. But the underlying idea dates back in
slightly different form at least to 1967, when Walter Trohan, a conservative
commentator for the Chicago Tribune, wrote that:
The federal government operates pretty much in line with the quip, “If it
moves, tax it; if you can’t tax it, control it; if you can’t control it, give it a
million dollars.”24
Thus the quip was already known in 1967. But it needed a celebrity to make it
truly contagious, and Ronald Reagan was the celebrity who did just that.
Note the poetic quality of the three elements of the quip, but improved upon
between Trohan and Reagan. Each line in Reagan’s version has the same basic
structure of an “if-then” statement, with the dependent clause starting with “if”
and the independent clause a simple two-word statement that is a command in
the form of a verb followed by the word “it.” The rhetorical form not only added
dignity to the quip but also aided its unaltered transmission and contributed to its
high rate of contagion, probably because it suggests that everyone is talking
about how onerous taxes are and that it isn’t just the speaker who is complaining.
In short, it seems likely that narratives like the Laffer curve and other supply-
side stories touched off an intense public mandate for tax cutting.
We might argue, too, that the constellation of narratives about tax cutting and
smaller government propelled a social movement: entrepreneurship. In 1987, the
New York Times reported on one of Reagan’s pro-entrepreneurship narratives. It
is often remembered today for its wit:
“You know I have a recent hobby,” the President remarked in a speech on
economic matters earlier this month. “I have been collecting stories that I can

tell, or prove are being told by the citizens of the Soviet Union among
themselves, which display not only a sense of humor but their feeling about
their system.”
Mr. Reagan then told his current favorite, about a Russian who wants to
buy a car. A Matter of Delivery.
The man goes to the official agency, puts down his money and is told that
he can take delivery of his automobile in exactly 10 years.
‘ “Morning or afternoon?” the purchaser asks. “Ten years from now, what
difference does it make?” replies the clerk.
“Well,” says the car-buyer, “the plumber’s coming in the morning.”25
Rubik’s Cube was just a toy, not support for an economic narrative. But
Reagan’s lighthearted jokes made for economically powerful entrepreneurial
narratives. These new narratives encouraged entrepreneurial spirit and risk
taking, and they brought about profound changes in the legal structure of the
world’s advanced economies.
These examples, the Laffer curve and Rubik’s Cube, are just two of a vast
universe of narratives. We need to understand their organizing force. The storage
points for all these narratives is the human brain, with its prodigious memory
capacity. In the next chapter, we use neuroscience to consider the structure of
this repository.

Chapter 6
Diverse Evidence on the Virality of
Economic Narratives
Further evidence on the impact of narrative contagion on the economy can be
found in the story structures in the human brain, in the brain’s processing of
frightening stories, in the long history of the news media in reinforcing
primordial human interactions, in the emotional impact of effective book jackets,
logos, and beauty contests.

The Impulse to Convey Stories
In 1958, brain surgeon Wilder Penfield implanted electrodes into the brains of
human subjects while performing brain surgery, undertaken for medical reasons
on wide-awake patients, under only local anesthesia because the brain itself has
no pain receptors. He discovered that electrically stimulating certain narrowly
focused parts of the brain caused it to hear a sequence of sounds in chronological
order:
When the electrode was applied in gray matter on the cut face of the temporal
lobe at point 23, the patient observed: “I heard some music.” Fifteen minutes
later, the electrode was applied to the same spot again without her knowledge.
“I hear music again,” she said. “It is like radio.” Again and again, then, the
electrode tip was applied to this point. Each time she heard an orchestra
playing the same piece of music. It apparently began at the same point and
went on from verse to chorus. Seeing the electrical stimulator box, from
where she lay under the surgical coverings, she thought it was a gramophone
that someone was turning on from time to time.1
Stimulating a different part of the brain caused a story to be told, again in
chronological sequence:
A young woman (N. C.) said, when her left temporal lobe was stimulated
anteriorly, at point 19 in Figure 5, “I had a dream, I had a book under my arm.
I was talking to a man. The man was trying to reassure me not to worry about
the book.” At a point 1 cm. distant, stimulation at point 20 caused her to say:
“Mother is talking to me.” Fifteen minutes later the same point was
stimulated: The patient laughed aloud while the electrode was in place. After
the withdrawal of the electrode, she was asked to explain. “Well, she said, “it
is kind of a long story but I will tell you.…”2
Penfield’s work has been highly influential in a number of disciplines. For our
purposes, his results indicate the extent to which the human brain structure
appears to embody some of the traits that we think of as exclusively human: the
propensity to make music and the propensity to tell stories as sequences of
events, stories that trigger emotions.
Modern neuroscience is trying to pin down the determinants of the human