Chapter 17. Boycotts, Profiteers, and Evil Business
1. Charles C. Boycott, “The State of Ireland,” Times (London), October 18, 1880, 6.
2. Wolman, 1916, p. 24.
3. Wolman, 1916, p. 34.
4. “Who Is a Profiteer, and What Shall Be Done with Him?” New York Tribune, June 16, 1918, p. D3.
5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/harding.asp.
6. “General Drop in Prices Forecast: Bankers and Traders Expect a Material Reduction in Practically All Lines—Say Era of Extravagance Has Passed,” Christian Science Monitor, September 25, 1920, p. 4.
7. “Women Fight High Prices,” Globe, September 4, 1920, p. 6.
8. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, September 2014, https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2014/article/the-first-hundred-years-of-the-consumer-price-index.htm.
9. “Sees High Prices for Several Years,” Boston Daily Globe, January 5, 1920, p. 13.
10. Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) argue with one hundred years’ data from seventeen countries on five-year inflation rates and five-year economic growth rates. They believe that there is no significant association between the two if one excludes the Great Depression, 1929–34.
11. “Attacks Profiteers in Immorality,” Boston Daily Globe, May 5, 1919, p. 2.
12. Mortimer Fishel, “Lawyers Who Feed on Soldiers’ Kin,” New York Times, August 11, 1918, p. 41.
13. Henry Hazlitt, “Profiteers as Public Benefactors,” New York Times, March 21, 1920, p. xxx10.
14. Fisher, 1928, p. 7.
15. “Federal Judge Whacks Profiteers Hard Blow,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1920, p. 11.
16. Jacob H. Hollander, Ph.D., “How Inflation Touches Every Man’s Pocketbook,” New York Times, May 2, 1920, p. XX1.
17. “Letters from the People: Excess Profits Tax, M. Hartley a Veteran of the Uncivil War,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 29, 1920, p. 28.
18. “Profiteers Are Incubators for ‘Reds’—Capper,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 25, 1920, p. A9.
19. “No Time for Pessimism,” Baltimore Sun, December 17, 1920, p. 8.
20. “Prices Will Never Reach 1914 Level,” Globe and Mail, August 27, 1920, p. 7.
21. “Trade Revival Coming, Hoover Tells Business,” New York Tribune, April 29, 1921, p. 9.
22. “Disjointed Prices,” Nashville Tennessean, September 26, 1921, p. 4.
23. “Summer Jewelry Is Conspicuous,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 23, 1921, p. 13.
24. “Children Nowadays Are Spending Money as If It Grew on Bushes,” Boston Daily Globe, October 23, 1921, p. E6.
25. Mitchell, 1985.
26. Samuel Crowther, “Fixing Wages,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 8, 1936, p. 7.
27. Cole and Ohanian, 2004.
28. “Favorable Conditions in Industry Cited,” Detroit Free Press, October 29, 1929, p. 25.
29. Claude A. Jagger, “Large Holiday Retail Sales Add Impetus to Business,” Atlanta Constitution, December 23, 1929, p. 15.
30. “If Deflation ‘Runs Its Course,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 1932, p. 16.
31. Catherine Hackett, “Why We Women Won’t Buy,” Forum and Century, December 1932.
32. “Jersey Clubwomen Urged to Arouse Public Opinion in Favor of Spending,” New York Herald Tribune, February 7, 1932, p. E11.
33. “What Is a Bargain?” Jewish Advocate, October 4, 1932. p. 3.
34. “Buy-Now Campaign Started in Capital,” Washington Post, October 25, 1930, p. 7.
35. “The Buy Now Campaign,” Hartford Courant, October 16, 1933, p. 8.
36. Arthur Brisbane, “Buy in August Campaign Will Help City Merchants,” Austin Statesman, August 2, 1933, p. 4.
37. “Angry Americans Lead Charge on Big Energy Bills,” Boston Globe, March 9, 1975, p. 2.
38. Richard L. Strout, “Fighting Back at Inflation: Will Nixon Be Able to Put Out Flames?” Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 1974, p. 1.
39. Lawrence Van Gelder, “Some Prices Cut by Meat Boycott,” New York Times, April 6, 1973, p. 1.
40. “A Boycott Fizzle—Little There to Boycott,” Atlanta Constitution, August 8, 1973, p. 26E.
41. “High Meat Prices: Housewives to Mobilize Again,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1974, sf_a1; “Nationwide Meat, Grain Boycott Launched by Consumer Group,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1974, p. A1.
Chapter 18. The Wage-Price Spiral and Evil Labor Unions
1. Lindbeck and Snower, 2001.
2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx. Gallup-documented public support in the United States for labor unions has been gaining strength since 2009, reaching 62% support in 2018.
3. J. H. Carmical, “Railroads Facing New Labor Crisis,” New York Times, March 12, 1950, p. F1.
4. Joe Edwards, “Transcripts Cite Hoffa Allies’ Plot against FBI,” Boston Globe, July 25, 2009, p. A10.
5. Blinder, 2004.
6. Bernanke et al., 1998.
7. Eisenhower, State of the Union Address, January 10, 1957, https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/1957_state_of_the_union.pdf.
8. Virgil P. Pownall, “Greed Blamed for Inflation,” Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1957, p. B4.
9. “Our Price Policeman,” New York Times, June 18, 1957, p. 32.
10. Friedman, 1973, p. ix.
11. Friedman, 1973, p. xi.
12. Sydney J. Harris, “Nothing about our Current Wage-Price Spiral Makes Sense,” Arizona Republic, October 8, 1975, p. 7.
13. Shiller, 1997, p. 16.
14. Donald I. Rogers, “Cause of Recession? No One Really Knows: It Came Like a Sudden Shower and Is the Oddest in History,” New York Herald Tribune, March 31, 1958, p. 1.
15. Richards, 1863, p. 12.
16. Fisher, 1928, p. 7.
Chapter 19. Future Narratives, Future Research
1. Hopkins et al., 2016.
2. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, GenerosityForLife.org, Charitable Profile, http://generosityforlife.org/generosity-data/data-tools/generosity-reports/.
3. “Reading Aloud,” Washington Post, October 25, 1899, p. 6.
4. See Colley, 2003.
5. Regarding women, see Driscoll et al., 2009.
6. OECD, “Behavioral Insights,” 2017, http://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/behavioural-insights.htm. See also Zeina Afif, “ ‘Nudge Units’—Where They Came From and What They Can Do,” World Bank “Let’s Talk Development” blog, October 25, 2017, http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/nudge-units-where-they-came-and-what-they-can-do.
7. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-4-1933-first-inaugural-address.
8. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/march-12-1933-fireside-chat-1-banking-crisis.
9. See https://www.sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/google-index-google-bot-crawler/why-does-a-google-search-with-the-parenthesis-operator-sometimes-deliver-more-results-than-the-same-search-without-it/.
10. Callahan and Elliott, 1996.
11. Piore, 2010.
12. Blinder, 1990; Blinder et al., 1998.
13. Bewley, 1999.
14. David Romer and Christina Romer (1989), using what they called a “narrative approach,” studied the Record of Policy Actions and Minutes of the Federal Open Markets Committee of the US Federal Reserve to discern the real impact of monetary policy. Valerie Ramey (2011) and Alberto Alesina, Carlo Favero, and Francesco Giavazzi (2019) have used narrative approaches to study the effects of fiscal policy. All these studies were focused on finding the real exogenous component of government policy, rather than, as in this book, on understanding the thinking of the broader public.
15. Merton and Kendall, 1946.
16. http://www.issp.org/menu-top/home/.
17. http://gss.norc.org/.
18. https://isr.umich.edu/. See also the book from the director of the ISR’s consumer surveys, Richard Thomas Curtin (2019).
19.
https://medium.com/ideo-stories/the-focus-group-is-dead-24e1ec2dda82.
20. See, for example, Edmunds, 2000.
21. https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/.
22. For example, Chen et al. (2016) compute a “propagation score” of narrative contagion based on citations and citations within citations. Such measures relate to the contagion importance of narratives beyond the mere count of numbers of mention.
Appendix: Applying Epidemic Models to Economic Narratives
1. Miller (2012) derives this equation from a stochastic model based on Poisson processes and generalizing to variants of the Kermack-McKendrick model.
2. See Carvalho and Gonçalves, 2016, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.09313.pdf.
3. The common rate equations in chemistry resemble closely the three-equation system shown here, but with SI in the first two equations replaced with just S. https://bio.libretexts.org/TextMaps/Map%3A_Biochemistry_Online_(Jakubowski)/06%3A_TRANSPORT_AND_KINETICS/B._Kinetics_of_Simple_and_Enzyme-Catalyzed_Reactions/B2._Multi-Step_Reactions.
Here S, I, and R are three chemicals together, and the model is, for example, applied to radioactive decay of three elements together, where S, I, and R are the quantities of the elements, where I refers to the intermediate element, and R the last element, which is stable. There are the same two parameters c and r, and plots of S, I, and R may look similar to those here, with a hump-shaped pattern for I, and there are both fast and slow reactions depending on c and r. But in that consecutive chemical reactions model, the size of the epidemic is always 100%. More similar models in chemistry involve reactions that require the pairing of chemicals in a solution. https://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/basicrates/arrhenius.html.
4. The SIRS model is the same as the SIR model above except that a term +sR is added to the right-hand side of the first equation and −sR to the right-hand side of the third equation, where s > 0 is a re-susceptibility rate. In this model the infectives’ path may, depending on parameters, look similar to that in Figure A.1 but approaching a nonzero horizontal asymptote as time increases: the infectives never effectively disappear, and the disease becomes endemic. See Breda et al., 2012.
5. Grais et al., 2004.
6. Legrand et al., 2007.
7. Long et al., 2008.
8. JSTOR catalogs over nine million scholarly articles and books in all fields, and 7% of these are in business or economics, but 25% of the articles with “ARIMA,” “ARMA,” or “autoregressive” are in business or economics.
9. Moving average models are sometimes justified by reference to the Wold decomposition theorem (1954), which shows that any covariance stationary stochastic process can be modeled as a moving average of noise terms plus a deterministic component. But there is no justification for assuming that simple variants of ARIMA models are so general. We may be better able to do economic forecasting in some cases if we represent these error terms or driving variables as the result of co-epidemics of narratives about which we have some information.
10. See Nsoesie et al., 2013.
11. Nathanson and Martin, 1979.
12. Bailey et al., 2016.
13. Surveyed in Lamberson, 2016.
14. See Banerjee, 1992; Bikhchandani et al., 1992.
15. Goel et al., 2016.
16. Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955, pp. 44–45.
17. Herr et al., 1991.
18. Bauckhage, 2011.
19. Shiller and Pound, 1989, p. 54. The words in square brackets were omitted from the version of this question given to individual investors.
20. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-this-the-end-of-money/.
21. Rand and Wilson (1991), Zeng et al. (2005), Zheng et al. (2015), and Olsen et al. (1988) claim that a chaotic form of the SEIR model fits data on epidemics of measles, mumps, and rubella.
22. The basic idea of an information cascade was developed by Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani et al. (1992), carried further by Vives (1996) and Banerjee and Fudenberg (2004).
23. Akerlof and Yellen, 1985.
24. Restaurant choice is the featured example in Banerjee, 1992.
25. Banerjee and Fudenberg (2004) address the question, from game theory, when thoroughly rational actors may form a consensus on false information.
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