astronomical, and not due to any war. Prices in marks rose on the order of a
trillionfold. And yet many people were unable to identify the malefactor who
was causing inflation. Irving Fisher, an American economist who visited
Germany at the time, found that Germans did not blame their own government,
which had been printing money excessively. Fisher wrote:
The Germans thought of commodities as rising and thought of the American
gold dollar as rising. They thought we [the United States] had somehow
cornered the gold of the world and were charging an outrageous price for it.16
As of this writing, there is some suggestion of resurgence in the strength of
labor unions, and of public support for them, in the United States. The wage-
price spiral narrative does not seem poised to reappear. Inflation in the United
States and other countries seems unusually tame. However, a mutation of the
narrative could appear if inflation begins to creep up. The public tends to watch
consumer prices closely, because of its constant repetition of purchases. The
wage-price spiral narrative, or some variation on that theme, could again create a
strong impulse for economic actors to try to get ahead of the inflation game. It
could give them newfound zest in this effort by bringing a moral dimension into
the mix, a perception of true evil in inflation, personified by certain celebrities or
classes of people.

Perennial Narratives: A Summing Up
The list of nine narrative constellations in part III of this book offers a glimpse of
the narrative forces that have driven economies into and out of booms and busts.
One broad lesson that we may take from this list is the immense complexity of
the narrative landscape. No simple index of public opinion, such as the
Consumer Confidence Index, summarizes the “strength” of the economy. The
various narratives that share the stage at any point have, in a biological analogy,
many cellular receptors and signaling molecules. Modern communication means
that new and different kinds of epidemics are possible, and economic forecasting
requires close attention to many different narratives. Forecasting in the future
will require a new attention to data that are becoming available, as we discuss in
part IV.

Part IV
Advancing Narrative Economics

Chapter 19
Future Narratives, Future Research
Disease epidemiology has shown us that there will likely be repeats of variants
of older epidemics in the future as reservoirs of old epidemics mutate or react to
a changed environment to start a new wave of contagion. There will be new
forms of influenza and new influenza epidemics. So, too, many of the narratives
described in this book will become epidemic again, weaken after years have
passed, and then rise more. The timing is unpredictable; unlike the hypothesized
business “cycles,” narratives don’t recur at regular time intervals.
The studies in this book reveal powerful economic narratives of the past that
are mostly inactive and sometimes largely forgotten today. However, they are not
completely forgotten, and someone seeking a powerful story may rediscover
them. The constellations may change, providing new context for, and thereby
increasing the contagion rate of, an old narrative and developing the idea into a
major epidemic, sometimes after a long time lag.
In this book, I have made unusually heavy use of paragraph-length quotes. I
did so to give readers a historical sense of a past narrative that made an impact
and might make an impact again if it is repeated in the same words. As with
jokes or songs, to be effective a narrative has to be worded and delivered just
right.
When it comes to predicting economic events, one becomes painfully aware
that there is no exact science to understanding the impact of narratives on the
economy. But there can be exact research methods that contribute to such an
understanding. There is no exact science about how to evaluate novels or
symphonies either, but there are exact methods that may provide information that
contributes inspiration to those who involve themselves with such things. We
have to avoid the “seductive allure” of superficial arguments about the economy
using scientific analogies to lend a sense of precision to a theory that in fact may
be of little substance.1 We need to keep the true scientific method in mind even
when trying to use an essentially humanistic approach.
Let us proceed with some suggestions from the analysis in this book about

future economic narratives, and how we can in the future direct research that
allows a better, if inevitably imperfect, understanding of them.