Ngrams is designed to count phrases, and to compare the counts through time,
but Ngrams and other search engines could do much more to ensure that users
can accurately compare counts through time.
In addition, we should be collecting time-series data about economic
narratives at least once a year, ideally more often than that, and on an
uninterrupted basis for decades into the future, and in multiple countries and
languages. Such data-collection efforts might include the following:
1. Regular focused interviews of respondents inviting them to talk
expansively and tell stories in response to stimulus questions related to
their economic decisions. The instructions would ask respondents to tell a
story that is interesting or suggestive of causes in the current environment.
This is the listening as a research method advocated by Charlene Callahan
and Catherine S. Elliott10 and the qualitative research advocated by Michael
Piore.11 Some researchers have conducted such research, notably Alan
Blinder and his coauthors,12 who interviewed top executives about how they
reach decisions about price setting, and Truman Bewley,13 who asked
managers about their wage setting. Still more researchers have studied
narratives to try to infer motivations of those who decide on fiscal and
monetary policy.14
Focused interviews are interviews of individuals that ask them to focus
on their understandings and stories related to current behavior. Focused
interviews began to be used as research tools in the 1920s and were given a
firm foundation by Robert K. Merton and Patricia L. Kendall in 1946.15
Unfortunately, these researchers usually conducted these interviews as
one-time-only events, and they did not try to collect long time-series
information that would reveal how answers and stories changed through
history. If such data had been collected, the entire stories would have been
digitized as sections of long time series and preserved for future textual
analysis. The data could then have been added to major economic data
collections. These include databases such as the Panel Study of Income
Dynamics at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, the
Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Swedish
Household Market and Nonmarket Activities database (HUS) at
Gothenburg University. Maintaining a consistent research environment
through time would allow intertemporal comparisons, though the list of

stimuli would have to be augmented as time goes on and as relevant new
words and concepts appear. There would likely be some overlap with other
surveys, such as those conducted internationally under the International
Social Survey Program.16 New efforts could go well beyond the work to
date of the University of Chicago General Social Survey17 or the University
of Michigan Institute for Social Research,18 which have been useful for
many purposes in the past.
2. Regular focus groups with members of different socioeconomic groups
to elicit actual conversations about economic narratives. A focus group
is a focused interview done on a group of people. The group interview is
especially important for narrative economics since it creates an
environment that simulates the very interpersonal contagion that underlies
the epidemiology of narratives. The focus group is an important and
common research method, typically used by marketers to learn how people
in various demographic groups talk among themselves about products or
political candidates.
In a focus group, the researcher puts together people who likely
represent actual groups in human society; participants are typically similar
in age, live in the same geographical region, and share other factors that
influence social group cohesion. By putting similar people together, the
researcher attempts to eliminate barriers of “political correctness” that
might inhibit normal conversation in unnatural groups. The focus group
leader then facilitates talk about stimulus words related to the subject of the
research and records the conversation. Running focus groups requires
human judgment on the part of the interviewer. It is an art as well as a
science, the art of getting people to think and talk about why they do certain
things or hold particular beliefs.
Focus groups are thus experimental situations that could become real
observations of the contagion of ideas. Though common, focus groups
researchers do not usually seek to provide voluminous data over decades in
an attempt to learn about the causes of economic changes. In the case of
economic narratives, focus-group participants might be asked to respond to
words or phrases such as stock market, bank, unemployed, the real reason
to save, or government actions that might impact your future economic
welfare or that of your children. Recorded videos of the focus groups might
be digitized, and, in the future, possibly even scanned and analyzed by