facial recognition and emotionally categorized algorithms.
Focus groups are now recognized as valid tools for research into popular
understandings and motivations. Focus groups have their critics,19 for they
are often poorly managed, but when done well they are extremely useful.
Economists, however, have been extremely loath to use them. Economics
and finance are the worst fields for references to focus groups. In the
decade 2010–2019, only 0.04% of scholarly economics articles and 0.02%
of scholarly finance articles mention the term focus group despite the fact
that focus group methods, developed largely by practitioners of marketing
science, are much improved in terms of sampling, directing, and
experimenting.20
One of the propositions in chapter 8 of this book holds that the economic
impact of narratives may change through time, depending on details of the
narrative and of the zeitgeist. We saw examples of apparent inconsistencies:
The outbreak of World War I caused the US stock market to collapse, while
the outbreak of World War II caused the market to soar. The bombing
attacks linked with the “big Red scare” in the United States in 1920 were
associated with a decline in economic activity, while the 9/11 attacks in
2001 were associated with ample spending and the end of a recession. A
timely and appropriately led set of focus groups that homed in on
assumptions, emotions, and loyalties might have given us a better
understanding of why people behaved as they did.
3. A historical database of focus groups conducted for other purposes in
years past. The Public Opinion Research Archive provided by the Roper
Center for Public Policy Research,21 now at Cornell University, has since
1947 amassed a database of opinion survey responses, including the Gallup
Data Collection. This archive, however, tabulates answers to individual
questions about opinions, questions changing in wording through time and
as part of changing questionnaires that provide changing context in terms of
other questions asked in the same survey. It does not listen to respondents in
their own words and their own thought innovations. The archive is useful,
but it is hard to appreciate what elements are contagious or to judge
changes in thinking from it. There should be a massive database that asks
those conducting focus groups around the world to share the results of past
focus group results that may be relevant to understanding changing
narratives. It would ask them to share the results of past focus group results

that may be relevant to economic narratives. The database administrators
would ask permission to publish raw data while remaining suitably
respectful of past privacy promises made to participants. The administrators
would then find some way (a challenge!) to organize these past focus
groups into the closest approximations of computer-searchable time series,
which would permit researchers to use the data to plot epidemic curves for
specific narratives, as I have done in this book for newspapers and books.
4. Databases of sermons. Thousands of religious organizations, churches,
synagogues, mosques, and the like, must have records of old sermons
(derashas, khutbahs, etc.), but databases seem designed for sermon
preparation rather than historical research. Sermons are important because
they touch on moral values as they seek the deeper meanings in life.
Changes in these moral values and value judgments about what is right and
wrong are undoubtedly relevant to changing economic decisions.
5. Historical databases of personal letters and diaries, digitized and
searchable. There are the beginnings of such databases already, but we
could make a more determined effort to encourage families to donate
diaries of deceased family members to such databases. Existing databases
do not seem to be based on random samples of the world population with
associated personal information. They tend to be assemblages selected for
research with a specific purpose, such as research on a single war or social
issue in a single country. These are still useful, but better sampling would
make for better knowledge on how to generalize results to a broader
population.
None of the above-listed data collections is likely to reach the desired scope
in the academic research mill any time soon. The payoff to such research is far in
the future, and the judgment of such resources is too hard to formalize.
Academic research conducted by individuals, who are under pressure to “publish
or perish,” is unlikely to start data-collection efforts that will help us understand
the relatively rare, but serious, depressions and financial crises that occur from
decade to decade, but perhaps no more than twice in a lifetime.
Many survey organizations have been collecting some of the data outlined in
the wish list above. They should be funded to do so systematically and
consistently through time. I have collected such data on a small scale, with
questionnaire surveys of both individual and institutional investors about the