Chapter 6. Diverse Evidence on the Virality of Economic Narratives
1. Penfield, 1958, p. 57.
2. Penfield, 1958, p. 57.
3. Scholz et al., 2017, p. 2882.
4. Zak, 2015.
5. Maren and Quirk, 2004.
6. Milad et al., 2005.
7. Milad et al., 2014.
8. Miłosz, 1990 [1951], p. 239.
9. Hume, 1788 [1742], p. 103.
10. An account of this depression, from the viewpoint of the Province of Pennsylvania, is in Berg, 1946.
11. Alexander Windmill, Letter to the Printer, New-London Gazette, reprinted in the Connecticut
Courant, May 20, 1765, p. 1. See also Colin McEnroe, “A Page from History: We Were There,” Hartford
Courant, October 29, 1997, p. F8.
12. Le Bon, 1895.
13. Quoted from the Boston Transcript in “Art and Business in Book-Jackets,” Literary Digest 70
(September 10, 1921): 26–27.
14. Akerlof and Shiller, 2015.
15. Holt, 2002; Klein, 2009.
16. Keynes, 1936.
17. Newspapers used to run many beauty contests. In 1920, the Evening World in New York ran a series
of photos of beautiful women, some of them famous, not all at once but over weeks, inviting readers to clip
out and mail in a nominating coupon with a list of their five favorites. The reader could also suggest a new
name and enclose a photo that might be added to the list of contestants for later publication. The list of the
readers’ favorites was published and updated. There was, however, no prize to the reader, except possibly in
the form of pleasure for having picked the winners. Moreover, the newspaper asked readers to select five
favorites, not six. I have not been able to find the exact same beauty contest noted by Keynes. https://www
.newspapers.com/image/78732551/?terms=Evening%2BWorld’s%2BBeauty%2BContest.
18. Allen et al., 2006.
19. R. A. Fisher, 1930.
20. See Leonard, 2006.
21. Bruner, 1998, p. 18.
22. Gaser et al., 2004.
23. Saavedra et al., 2009.
24. Losh and Gordon, 2014; Pierce et al., 2001.
25. Kahneman and Tversky, 2000; Thaler, 2015, 2016.
26. Johnson and Tversky, 1983; Slovic et al., 2007.
27. Loewenstein et al., 2001.
28. Dohmen et al., 2006.
29. Achen and Bartels, 2017.
30. Boltz et al., 1991.
31. Areni and Kim, 1993.
32. Cheng et al., 2017.

Chapter 7. Causality and Constellations
1. Hume, 1788 [1742], essay XIV, p. 101.
2. Farnam, 1912, p. 5.
3. Jevons, 1878, p. 36.
4. Merton, 1948; Azariadis, 1981; Cass and Shell, 1983; Farmer, 1999.
5. In his book The Tyranny of Metrics (2018), Jerry Muller details how overreliance on quantitative
outcome measures defies sensible decision making in colleges, universities, schools, medicine, policing, the
military, business, finance, philanthropy, and foreign aid.
6. “Stock Prices Move Up to Permanently High Plateau,” Toronto Star, October 16, 1929, p. 14.
7. Kai Sedgwick, “46% of Last Year’s ICOs Have Failed Already,” February 23, 2018, Bitcoin. com,
https://news.bitcoin.com/46-last-years-icos-failed-already/.
8. Escalas, 2007.
9. Machill et al., 2007.
10. McQuiggan et al., 2008, p. 538.
11. Slater et al., 2003.
12. Cronon, 2013, p. 12.
13. Psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik (1977) coined the term “flashbulb memory” and used
the example of the news of the 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. They hypothesized that
flashbulb memory happens when there is both extreme surprise and emotional arousal.
14. Luminet and Curci, 2009.
15. “The First Gun: Its Ominous Report Was Heard Around the World,” Los Angeles Times, February 1,
1896, p. 11.
16. “University High’s Class of ’42 Still Remembers Pearl Harbor,” Los Angeles Times, December 7,
1981, p. F1.
17. The NBER announces US recession dates months after the fact. In this case, the March 2001
beginning of the recession was not announced until November 2001. But economists generally thought the
economy was in recession in September 2001.
18. “The Perfect Storm Tears Heart Out of the US Economy,” Guardian, November 14, 2001, p. 26.
19. “At O’Hare, President Says ‘Get on board!’ ” September 27, 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse
.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927-1.html.
20. Greg Ip mentioned the possibility that “a burst of patriotism” might be a factor in rising confidence
then. “After Sept. 11 Attacks, a Rebound, of Sorts,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2001, p. A1.
21. “A central claim of the source-monitoring approach is that people do not typically directly retrieve an
abstract tag or label that specifies a memory’s source; rather, activated memory records are evaluated and
attributed to particular sources through decision processes performed during remembering” (Johnson et al.,
1993).
22. Johnson et al., 1993.
23. Barthes, 2013 [1984], http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wrestlin.html.
24. “Kilrain’s Rheumatism,” Cincinnati Inquirer, February 22, 1890, p. 2.
25. “But a prolusion of that kind [rhetorical] ought not to be like that of gladiators, who brandish spears
before the fight, of which they make no use in the encounter.” Cicero, 1860 [55 BCE], pp. 178–79.