1932 from a taxi driver:
A Taxi Driver in Cleveland—Did you come in from the East? How are things
there? If you want to know how they are here, watch the garbage cans behind
the all-night restaurants about 3 o’clock mornings. See the guys who are
getting their meals that way. They aren’t all bums by a long shot.… Do they
think East that Roosevelt can make things better? Anyhow they can’t be
worse. I used to make a good living before Hoover came in. Not on this taxi. I
was firing on the Central but they took my job away; no business. This is a
good burg, but it is flat now. When do you suppose it will come back?
This quote suggests a contagious narrative about good people made so desperate
by the Great Depression that they are reduced to eating garbage. The idea
conjures a mental image and an emotion of disgust. The taxi driver also asks a
question for which there was no clear answer: When will prosperity return? He
wants to know whether the country is stuck in a long-term depression because
his economic decisions (for example, how much to spend) depend on the answer.
The desperation narrative of people eating garbage may suggest a long haul,
which leads the taxi driver to ask the urgent question “When do you suppose it
will come back?” The driver wanted some enlightenment about the future from
the apparently knowledgeable Krock, but he probably did not expect a
quantitative answer. Rather, he probably hoped Krock would provide some kind
of narrative offering clues as to the future.3
In judging the impact of economic narratives on human economic behavior,
we will find it helpful to recall that conversations rarely touch on important
economic decisions, such as how much to save for retirement. Should you save
5% of your income? 10%? more? Try to remember any conversation on this
topic, and likely you won’t dredge up a single one. And yet people have to make
decisions about how much to save, and they must base this decision on
something. Maybe that decision during the Great Depression was influenced by
the narratives of depression hardship, like those men eating from garbage cans at
3 a.m. Maybe, too, the decision was based on the impressions of worried experts,
whom nobody really knew, suggesting that there might be a reason to fear a
long-lived economic downturn with serious human consequences. On their own,
any individual, vague narratives might not have determined behavior, but a
constellation of such narratives may have.

Proposition 3: Narrative Constellations Have More Impact Than
Any One Narrative
Narratives that occur together in a constellation may have different origins, but
in our imaginations they seem grouped together in terms of some basic idea, and
they reinforce one another’s contagion. Alternative terms for narrative
constellations include grand narrative, master narrative, and metanarrative, but
I prefer not to use them because they suggest more organization or intellectual
quality than is warranted when simple story contagion spreads narratives across
a broad public.
Sometimes narratives within a constellation are stripped of identifying names
or places, and the narrative takes the form of “They say that …” without stating
who “they” are. In using the pronoun they, the teller of the “They say that”
narrative conveys that there is a constellation of narratives featuring or told by
seemingly authoritative persons. The borders of such narrative constellations
may be redrawn from time to time, with a particular narrative borrowing
contagion from other currently contagious narratives.
As we’ve seen, cryptocurrencies are backed by a constellation of related
narratives, with a few main stars and thousands or millions of smaller stars. As
of 2018, nearly two thousand cryptocurrencies competed with the original
Bitcoin. Each of these cryptocurrencies is a story of entrepreneurship, of eager
developers with an idea. But the largest constellation of cryptocurrency stories
focuses on Bitcoin-related stories. In one narrative, the popular singer Lily Allen
turned down an offer in 2009 to do one performance and be paid in Bitcoin. This
narrative has a memorable punch line: Allen is kicking herself in regret today,
for if she’d accepted the offer and held on to her Bitcoin, she would have been a
billionaire by 2017.4 Stories like this one help sustain the growth of the Bitcoin
narrative and Bitcoin prices by invoking people’s feelings of regret for not
discovering the investment themselves. Like so many other narratives, this story
focuses on a celebrity who starts a narrative or keeps it going.
It is difficult to define the exact parameters of narrative constellations. Often
we can find only superficial examples of some of their stories. Most narratives
are never written down and are lost forever. Moreover, the narratives sit in the
background and are rarely expressed when decisions are made. For example, if
you are discussing with your spouse whether to buy a new car this year or wait

until times look more secure, you may be unlikely to tell to your spouse one of
the stories that makes you feel secure or insecure. Thus it becomes difficult to
establish a connection between the narratives and the action. The final link
between a verbal narrative and economic action may ultimately be nonverbal.