Dollars and Dragons

People want villains to hate and heroes to cheer over economic issues

2026-08-01T13:03:31.333-07:00

"The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer—and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that."

Thomas Sowell, Dismantling America: And Other Controversial Essays (2010), p. 335

From https://www.readsowell.com/.

"The largest verified collection of Thomas Sowell quotes on the internet. Sourced. Searchable. Free."

For College Applicants, Pressure to Make Summers Count Has Gotten Even Worse

2026-03-03T10:10:22.636-08:00

Teens scramble to specialize their summer pursuits early—to convey a ‘story’ to college admissions officers

By Jasmine Li of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Overachieving teenagers have long pursued a smorgasbord of résumé-polishing summer activities. But a range of impressive summer pursuits is no longer enough, some college advisers say. Students now feel pressure to specialize—as early as their freshman summer—in interests they want to pursue in college.
The idea, college advisers say, is to assemble a list of summer pursuits that show increasing mastery in a distinct specialty. That “narrative” can help students stand out"
"So many students now have high GPAs and strong test scores that the competition has extended to the summer"
[A Stanford freshman] "advises high-schoolers to choose between science and the humanities early on. By junior year of high school, she says, students should specialize within those fields and plan their extracurriculars around that specialty."
"Parents pay thousands of dollars and enlist college counselors to burnish their high-schoolers’ summer portfolios."
"The key is crafting a clear narrative about a student’s passions through their extracurriculars, essays and résumés."
"Ben Bousquet, director of college consulting at Sierra Admissions and a former assistant admissions director at Vanderbilt University, said his strategy is to help narrow students’ academic interests down to one or two passions. He then recommends summer programs that authentically align with those interests."

Related posts on storytelling and authenticity:

Colleges And Universities Try To Be Like Hogwarts. What Would Carl Jung Say? (2025)

The Myth of Authenticity Or The Story Behind Products (2010)

It seems that people will pay extra if a product has a good story or myth behind it

The Guru Who Says He Can Get Your 11-Year-Old Into Harvard (big lesson: Optimize childhood ): Jamie Beaton’s Crimson Education offers a pricey, yearslong boot camp preparing kids to apply to the Ivy League. Parents, and Wall Street, are on board (2024)

"Independent education consultants" help high school students and their parents navigate the competitive college-admissions process (creative destruction and how the economy just keeps creating new types of occupations & professions) (2024)

Students: Make a mistake on purpose, its good for you! (2007)

This may sound surprising, but counselors advocate making a mistake on your college applications like an intentional typo. This makes you seem more "authentic." Too often all students look slick and identical. They got good grades, test scores, were on teams, did volunteer work, etc., all with the idea of getting into college. But is that who you really are if you do it just to impress the college? That is why counselors suggest making mistakes. Then your application makes you seem like a more real person, not too good to be true. Of course, colleges project an image, too with their pictures of the nicest parts of the campus and groups of smiling students in their catalogues to make you want to go their. Seems like everyone is trying to impress everyone else with an image.

Counternarrating Entrepreneurship

2026-02-14T15:00:00.000-08:00

By Ewald Kibler & Lauri Laine of Aalto University.

"Abstract
Schumpeter envisioned entrepreneurship research as a way to examine and understand how capitalism changes. This notwithstanding, contemporary entrepreneurship studies predominantly explore the emergence and growth of new business firms, thus adopting a view that assumes a positive macro-level role for entrepreneurship in society even as it neglects the destructivity which was key to Schumpeter's theory. To bring capitalism back into entrepreneurship, we suggest a narrative approach to entrepreneurial history. Specifically, we introduce counternarratives to discuss new ways of thinking about the micro-macro linkage in entrepreneurship and to open up fresh understandings of creative destruction within, and beyond, capitalism. We conclude the paper with practical suggestions for new entrepreneurial histories that develop alternative narratives."

The dialectic of 'creative-destruction': a fabric of entrepreneurial heroes, the case of an emblematic novel: The Ladies' Paradise

2026-02-04T14:57:00.000-08:00

Sylvain Bureau and Rym Ibrahim. From International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing.

"Abstract
The Schumpeterian 'creative destruction' is a well-known concept, yet there is a tendency to emphasise either its bright side - entrepreneurs as great contributors to economic development - or its dark side - entrepreneurs' activities contributing to various damages. In this paper, we aim to move beyond this dichotomy to fully grasp the dialectic. To do so, we pose the following question: How does the 'creative destruction' dialectic support the fabric of heroic entrepreneurs? To answer this question, we analyse a 19th-century narrative of an entrepreneurial journey as depicted in the famous novel The Ladies' Paradise by the naturalist writer Émile Zola. Based on our analysis, we detail how four themes of narrative dialectic - economic, socio-political, cognitive, and artifactual - support the fabric of an entrepreneurial hero in the novel. This new framework helps to reconceptualise 'creative destruction' and offers new perspectives for discussing the heroisation of entrepreneurs, bringing new possibilities for teaching entrepreneurship through fiction."

Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’

2025-12-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

Brands trying to wrest greater control of their narratives are asking for ‘storytelling’ skill sets—without a campfire in sight

By Katie Deighton of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Corporate America’s latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history: storyteller.
Some companies want a media relations manager by a slightly flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelists, playwrights and raconteurs.
“As storytellers,” a Google job ad said last month, “we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long-term growth.”
The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company’s Google Cloud storytelling team. One article the unit published this year was titled, “Lowe’s innovation: How Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences.”
Microsoft’s security organization meanwhile is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling, described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Compliance technology firm Vanta this month began hiring for a head of storytelling, offering a salary of up to $274,000."
"USAA . . . has begun to employ storytellers who write blogs, reports, scripts and other material to connect with members"
"calling salaried communications professionals “storytellers” and the practice of storytelling appears to only have picked up in popularity."
"The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term “storyteller” doubled in the year ended Nov. 26, to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications"
"Executives meanwhile said “storyteller” or “storytelling” on earnings calls and investor days 469 times this year through Dec. 11, compared with 359 times in all of 2024 and 147 times in 2015"
"The percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the U.S. that include the term ‘storyteller’ doubled in the year ended Nov. 26"

Washington State University Economics Professor: People need a narrative

2025-05-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

See To Gen Z, Everything Is a Recession Indicator: Investors have long turned to offbeat economic gauges like underwear sales and the length of hemlines. Now, the TikTok generation is taking it to the next level by Hannah Erin Lang of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"“People need a narrative. They need something they can understand,” said Christopher Clarke, an economist at Washington State University who posts regularly on TikTok and other social-media platforms. And if you’re an average person trying to understand the economy, he said, “you’re not going to use the yield curve.”"

From another post:

Terry Eagleton shares Campbell's idea of the sociological function of myths, which can be seen as "naturalizing and universalizing a particular social structure, rendering any alternative to it unthinkable." (Eagleton, 188) He does see myth and ideology working together because the rational side of any movement, ideology is not enough to stimulate political action on the part of the members of some group.

"Men and women engaged in such conflicts do not live by theory alone; socialists have not given their lives over the generations for the tenet that the ratio of fixed to variable capital gives rise to a tendential fall-off in the rate of profit. It is not in defence of the doctrine of base and superstructure that men and women are prepared to embrace hardship and persecution in the course of political struggle. Oppressed groups tell themselves epic narratives of their history, elaborate their solidarity in song and ritual, fashion collective symbols of their common endeavour. Is all this to be scornfully dismissed as so much mental befuddlement?" (Eagleton, 191-2)

His answer is no. It is all designed to "foster solidarity and self-affirmation." (Eagleton, 192)

(Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology. Vreso: London.)

An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey by Tyler Cowen

2025-03-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

A three part series by Tyler Cowen.

Part 1: Modeling Homer’s World.

Part 2: The Polities of The Odyssey.

Part 3: Polities and Economics.

‘The Narrative Brain’ Review: The Sense in a Story

2025-03-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

Narratives bring order to the world and entice us with emotional rewards. They also help people bond and recover after times of crisis.

By Matthew Hutson. Mr. Hutson is the author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.

He reviewed the book The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell by Fritz Alwin Breithaupt.

Excerpts:

"If humans were fish, our water would be narratives. We never experience reality unmediated. Light and sound filter through our senses and we impose meaning and order, building our familiar perceptual world of trees, people and buildings. At a higher level, we string events together into stories, ranging from brief encounters to autobiographical arcs to historical epochs and beyond. We use narratives to understand the causal influences in our lives; these unseen forces, manufactured by our minds, become what we know of reality."
"The first question is what defines a narrative. An important aspect is the segmentation of time. Every story has a beginning and end. Exactly how the human brain segments time is murky, and different people do it differently."
"in a narrative, a protagonist typically turns from active to passive or vice versa, as when a worker in a dead-end job decides to rebel. Mr. Breithaupt ignores Kurt Vonnegut’s delineation of other story shapes, like “man in hole,” where a character’s prospects turn from good to bad to good. Elsewhere, the author defines narratives as “strings of events,” and events as things that “bring about important, lasting, and irreversible changes that were not clearly recognizable in advance.”"
"narratives . . . bring order to the world and entice us with emotional rewards—amusement, astonishment, satisfaction, triumph. These are proximal benefits. One can also give ultimate or evolutionary accounts. “Narrative thinking offers numerous survival benefits,” Mr. Breithaupt writes, “expressed in better remembering, planning, reacting, and orienting, and potentially in overcoming depression and trauma.”"
"Narratives help people bond, coordinate and communicate. During and after times of crisis, we use narratives to repackage our experience of events, enabling us to recover and prepare for future hardship."
"the retold stories (in an experimental game of “telephone”) were often simplified, shrinking with each iteration. Sometimes details or major plot points changed. But what remained true were the core emotions"
"Mr. Breithaupt argues that “the mobility of consciousness”—the ability to take another’s perspective—would not have emerged without the rituals of performance."

Kirzner’s Entrepreneur and the Hero’s Journey

2025-02-24T18:16:00.000-08:00

By Amir Iraji. This appeared at the blog The Daily Economy which is run by The American Institute for Economic Research. Excerpt:

"Some economists have likened entrepreneurs to heroes, praising their role in disrupting industries and driving progress. Joseph Schumpeter, for instance, famously described them as agents of “creative destruction.” This description evokes the image of warriors boldly slaying the dragon of entrenched systems — tearing down outdated structures to pave the way for revolutionary innovation.

Yet Israel Kirzner, a leading economist in the Austrian tradition and a student of Ludwig von Mises, rejected this dramatic portrayal. Instead, he argued that entrepreneurship is about simply noticing opportunities that others overlook. At first glance, this view might seem to downplay the heroism of entrepreneurs. But does it really?

Exploring Kirzner’s ideas through the lens of the Hero’s Journey — a narrative framework developed by Carl Jung and later expanded by Joseph Campbell — reveals that even Kirzner’s entrepreneur is a hero, though in a subtler and less dramatic way.

In this framework, true heroism emerges in uncovering the potential of the unknown and bringing it into the light of consciousness."
"Every breakthrough, whether major or minor, every improvement in living standards, whether transformational or incremental, and every leap forward in human history has been an elixir brought back by entrepreneurs. Their heroic quests remind us that the unknown holds boundless potential waiting to be realized."

Who Says Entrepreneurs Are Heroes?

Does It Matter If We Call Entrepreneurs Heroes?

How Storytelling Enhances Team Decision-Making And Collaboration

2025-01-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

By Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio. She is CEO and Co-Founder, People Culture Drive Consulting Group; Chair, Executive Leadership Research Initiative for Women and Minority Attorneys (ELRIWMA); Senior Research Fellow, HLS Center on the Legal Profession.

Excerpts:

"research shows that storytelling isn’t just a powerful communication tool—it’s a critical leadership asset. It fosters collaboration, sparks creativity, and cultivates empathy. Understanding and using storytelling effectively is essential for leaders navigating complex team dynamics and decision-making to drive engagement and achieve impactful results."
"Paul Zak, a leading neuroscientist, underscores this idea. His research highlights how storytelling activates the brain’s release of oxytocin—the “trust molecule”—which enhances connection and empathy."
"Storytelling taps into the way humans are wired to connect and understand one another. Zak’s findings reveal that compelling narratives create trust, making individuals more willing to collaborate."
"a leader might recount how a team faced a challenging project deadline, detailing how each member’s contribution led to success. This kind of narrative builds trust and reinforces a shared sense of purpose"
"Empathy is the foundation of successful teamwork, and storytelling helps teams see the world through someone else’s perspective. Leaders who share customer experiences or stories of internal challenges make abstract concepts tangible and relatable."
a "narrative creates an emotional connection between team members and their work, helping them understand the bigger picture. As a result, storytelling enhances problem-solving by encouraging inclusivity and collaboration"
"Data is vital to decision-making, but numbers alone can feel impersonal or overwhelming. Storytelling bridges this gap by framing data within a relatable narrative, making it more memorable and actionable."
"Combining data with storytelling drives impactful decisions that resonate with the team."
"Storytelling is more than an engaging way to share information—it’s a critical leadership tool. It. . . builds trust, strengthens team dynamics, and enhances decision-making by connecting logic with emotion. Leaders who embrace storytelling can create an environment where collaboration thrives, ideas flourish, and goals are enthusiastically met."

Also see Storytelling That Drives Bold Change: How to craft a narrative that matters by Frances X. Frei and Anne Morriss in Harvard Business Review.

More risk-averse and less entrepreneurial people grew up listening to stories wherein competitions and challenges are more likely to be harmful than beneficial

2024-11-05T13:43:00.000-08:00

See Folklore by Stelios Michalopoulos & Melanie Meng Xue. From The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 136, Issue 4, November 2021. Excerpts:

"Abstract

Folklore is the collection of traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community passed through the generations by word of mouth. We introduce to economics a unique catalog of oral traditions spanning approximately 1,000 societies. After validating the catalog’s content by showing that the groups’ motifs reflect known geographic and social attributes, we present two sets of applications. First, we illustrate how to fill in the gaps and expand upon a group’s ethnographic record, focusing on political complexity, high gods, and trade. Second, we discuss how machine learning and human classification methods can help shed light on cultural traits, using gender roles, attitudes toward risk, and trust as examples. Societies with tales portraying men as dominant and women as submissive tend to relegate their women to subordinate positions in their communities, both historically and today. More risk-averse and less entrepreneurial people grew up listening to stories wherein competitions and challenges are more likely to be harmful than beneficial. Communities with low tolerance toward antisocial behavior, captured by the prevalence of tricksters being punished, are more trusting and prosperous today. These patterns hold across groups, countries, and second-generation immigrants. Overall, the results highlight the significance of folklore in cultural economics, calling for additional applications."
"Two broad observations motivate our study. First, narratives are central building blocks of our societies. We think in stories and explain the world by telling stories. Harari (2015), for example, identifies in the myths present in people’s collective imagination the roots of their successes and failures. Despite their central role in connecting actions to values and needs, economists have only recently turned to the study of narratives (e.g., Akerlof and Snower 2016; Shiller 2017).¹
Second, during the past two decades, a burgeoning body of work exploring the cultural, historical, and institutional roots of comparative development highlights the significance of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2017; Nunn 2020). Much of this research, however, relies on valuable but incomplete ethnographic sources including the widely used Ethnographic Atlas (EA). Furthermore, the absence of proxies of historical norms renders inquiries into how attitudes change and why they persist intractable.² Other weaknesses of the EA, the celebrated compilation of George Peter Murdock (1967), concern the uneven coverage of groups and attributes and measurement error."
"In this study, we leverage a group’s oral tradition to shed light on its cultural heritage and past social and economic structures. According to the Oxford Dictionary, folklore consists of the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. This corpus is the subject of the discipline of folklore. We do three things to reveal the potential of integrating traditional narratives in the toolset of economists and political scientists interested in the origins of comparative development, gender norms, morality, psychology, and culture.
First, we introduce to economics a catalog of folklore that codes the distribution of thousands of motifs across 958 world societies. This database is the lifetime work of eminent anthropologist and folklorist Yuri Berezkin. A motif, according to the author, is an episode or an image found in the set of narratives recorded in an ethnolinguistic community. We validate the catalog’s content by establishing that images and episodes in a group’s oral tradition reflect salient features of its physical environment. For example, groups closer to earthquake-prone regions have a higher incidence of earthquake-related motifs, groups on fertile land have more crop-related images, and groups living close to rivers (or in colder climates) have more episodes reflecting their respective landscapes. Then we link the groups in Berezkin’s collection to the EA and show that the folklore-based measures of political complexity, family structure, and subsistence mode robustly correspond to EA’s analogous traits.
Second, we illustrate how to use a group’s oral tradition to fill in gaps in the ethnographic record, focusing on the degree of political complexity and the presence of high gods. In addition, we show how one can use folklore to quantify the extent of the preindustrial market economy, a key economic aspect that the EA does not cover.
Third, we present a method to uncover a group’s cultural heritage that involves reading and classifying motifs by multiple individuals.³ We focus on trust, risk-taking, and gender norms to illustrate our approach. To capture trust, we look at how tricksters (a common archetype in oral traditions) are depicted in the motifs, distinguishing between cases where their deceiving behavior is successful or punished. Regarding risk-taking, we look at how challenges and competitions are portrayed, differentiating between tragedies and victories. To measure gender norms, we classify the various stereotypical roles males and females play in the motifs.
These folklore-based measures of historical attitudes are robust predictors of contemporary values and economic choices. Folks who grew up listening to stories where tricksters often fail to deceive their victims are more trusting and prosperous today. Groups with oral traditions rich with heroes who successfully tackle challenging situations tend to display more appetite for risk and appear more entrepreneurial. Societies whose folklore portrays women as less dominant, more submissive, and more likely to engage in domestic affairs than men tend to relegate their women to inferior roles in their communities, both historically and today. These patterns hold across countries, second-generation immigrants, and ethnic groups, suggesting that folklore may be one of the vehicles by which norms are intergenerationally transmitted."

The symbolic work of prices

2024-07-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

By Akash Miharia, Jan Osborn & Bart J. Wilson. In The Review of Austrian Economics.

Abstract:

"We posit that prices are signs, not just signals, that work in the same symbolic way as words. Both are complex, generative systems of shared meaning that rely on a web of intricate symbolic references. Just like the meaning of a word is a product of our social and linguistic action, the meaning of a price is a product of our relationship to the physical world phenomena of people in markets. The fundamental conception of both is to communicate and construct worlds with ourselves and others, enabling us to act in the world. Prices, like words, do symbolic work."

Personal narratives build trust across ideological divides

2024-07-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

By David Hagmann, Julia A. Minson & Catherine H. Tinsley.

"Abstract

Lack of trust is a key barrier to collaboration in organizations and is exacerbated in contexts when employees subscribe to different ideological beliefs. Across five preregistered experiments, we find that people judge ideological opponents as more trustworthy when opposing opinions are expressed through a self-revealing personal narrative than through either data or stories about third parties—even when the content of the messages is carefully controlled to be consistent. Trust does not suffer when explanations grounded in self-revealing personal narratives are augmented with data, suggesting that our results are not driven by quantitative aversion. Perceptions of trustworthiness are mediated by the speaker’s apparent vulnerability and are greater when the self-revelation is of a more sensitive nature. Consequently, people are more willing to collaborate with ideological opponents who support their views by embedding data in a self-revealing personal narrative, rather than relying on data-only explanations. We discuss the implications of these results for future research on trust as well as for organizational practice."

Maybe personal narratives are emotional and emotions are costly to fake. So the message is more believable. This reminds me of one of my papers, The Intersection of Economic Signals and Mythic Symbols.

"Abstract
Mythic symbols and economic signals represent more than what they are. Symbols represent universal ideas and themes and evoke feelings and emotions while economic signals are simple, efficient signs that stand for a more complex set of costly to learn characteristics and information. Symbols deal with the irrational and economic signals deal with the rational. Many of the signals cited in the economic literature work well because they have a symbolic element that speaks to people's emotions. By evoking emotions, a signal makes the receiver feel more confident about the truthfulness of the information it represents. The intersection of symbols and signals illustrates the relationship between the rational world of facts and irrational world of emotions and values, a relationship which needs to be explored as part of the development of the ideal type of homosocioeconomicus, the selfish yet value and community driven person."

Harvard Business School Prof Says Rituals Are Important

2024-04-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

See ‘The Ritual Effect’ Review: Well Worth Doing Again: Some rituals are inherited, others improvised. It’s possible to infuse even quotidian acts with a sense of consequence by Meghan Cox Gurdon.

She is a WSJ contributor and author of The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.

She reviews the book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton. Excerpts:

"In “The Ritual Effect,” Michael Norton lauds the capacity of ritual to infuse quotidian acts with a sense of consequence. Ritual, he writes, can transform “activities as ordinary as morning hygiene, household chores, or daily exercise from automated to animated experiences—conjuring up delight or wonder or peace.”
Mr. Norton is a professor at Harvard Business School and a student of behavioral economics, and what he calls a ritual could as easily be described as a custom, a practice, a routine or a bit of magical thinking. What a ritual is not, he emphasizes, is a habit. In his view, a habit pertains to the “what” we do, whereas a ritual speaks to the “how.” It is a distinction without much difference. Say a husband makes a frothy latte for his wife each morning: Some days he might do it by rote (making it a habit) while on others he might take extra care to perform the act with love (making it a ritual)."
"Human beings seem given to ritualized behavior. Some rituals come to us as legacies, as with the white dress of a bride; some arise from practical impulse, as with spring cleaning to rid a house of winter grit; some are improvisational, as with a family movie night that starts as an occasional treat and becomes a weekly fixture on the calendar."
"actionable protocols, which is to say, recommendations for ways we readers may add the emollient of ritual to our own lives."
"“No single ritual can elevate us into relationship nirvana,” Mr. Norton warns but adds that, in surveys, couples who enjoy rituals report being 5%-10% “more satisfied with their relationships.”"
"We read of “hedonic adaptation,” which is what happens when a person’s happiness stabilizes after an ecstatic experience; of the “collective effervescence” felt by people performing synchronized actions; of the Proust-like “positive mental time travel” that one performs when savoring an enjoyable experience while recalling other such instances."
"“The Ritual Effect” is also full of stories from the lab, where Mr. Norton and his colleagues test their ideas on invited audiences. It turns out that ritualized behavior has a dark side. Flouted, it may foment bitterness. As with social norms—those generally agreed-upon practices and attitudes that allow disparate persons to rub along in society without continual conflict—shared rituals require practitioners roughly to agree about what is happening and what is expected of them. Let one in the group refuse to go along, and we get what’s called “the black sheep effect,” which is the instinct to punish an uncooperative insider more harshly than one would an outsider. In the clinical setting, Mr. Norton says that there’s always one smarty-pants who refuses to join a communal activity. “The people in the audience reserve a special kind of derision for these opt-outers,” he writes. “Because, with ritual, there are no bystanders. You’re either doing it right and you’re one of us—or you’re wrong.”"
"When an old ritual no longer fits, whether at home or at work, Mr. Norton suggests we are wise to find new ones: “In our (re) marriages, in our (blended) families, in our mergers and acquisitions, in nations yearning to find peace, rituals of reconciliation help to turn the page and start a new chapter.”"

Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia about "collective effervescence."

"Collective effervescence (CE) is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, a community or society may at times come together and simultaneously communicate the same thought and participate in the same action. Such an event then causes collective effervescence which excites individuals and serves to unify the group.
Collective effervescence is the basis for Émile Durkheim's theory of religion as laid out in his 1912 volume Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim argues that the universal religious dichotomy of profane and sacred results from the lives of these tribe members: most of their life is spent performing menial tasks such as hunting and gathering. These tasks are profane. The rare occasions on which the entire tribe gathers together become sacred, and the high energy level associated with these events gets directed onto physical objects or people which also become sacred."

New book: The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People

2024-04-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

It is by Paul Seabright. Click here to go to the Amazon link.

"A novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world

Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call."

The hidden forces of memory lead to the formation of identity and the creation of our own life narrative

2024-03-04T08:15:00.000-08:00

See ‘Why We Remember’ Review: Finding Time Again and Again by Brandy Schillace. She reviews the book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath.

Ms. Schillace, the editor in chief of the journal Medical Humanities, is the host of the online “Peculiar Book Club” and the author of “Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher.”

Excerpt:

"Memories are “born in the moment of reconstruction,” often with plenty of veracity—but never as photographic copies. They can be influenced by emotion—the stronger the emotion, the more readily our brains will hold on to that memory—and are often the root of hidden biases. A decision we make today may have been influenced by a strong emotional memory; as a result, emotional memories become hidden forces that deeply and often invisibly impact how we view the world, even what jobs, paths or partners we choose. Psychological intervention often requires us to revise our memories and put them into a new, less emotional context [this reminds me of Jung saying we need to ask, “What myth am I living by?”]. The war veteran must learn to hear loud noises without the fear-laden memory response to bombs falling; the child once attacked by a dog must learn to encounter four-legged animals without trepidation. Yet the hidden forces of memory, good and bad, also lead to something more germane: the formation of identity and the creation of our own “life narrative.”
This sense of self sits upon shifting sand, but we should want it no other way. The most significant lesson of “Why We Remember” is that we need not be prisoners to our incompletely remembered past. The very malleability of memory means we can take an active role in what and how we recall, and use it to shape our future."

Also see What Myth are You Living By? by Diane Hancox.

And Revisioning Your Hero's Journey®: A Mythological Toolbox by Robert Walter.

Parents pay big $s for consultants to improve their kid's stories for college admissions

2024-02-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

See Inventing the Perfect College Applicant: For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait by Caitlin Moscatello. This is a fascinating article, even beyond the issue I focus on. Excerpts:

"For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in."

"The theme of the passion project becomes what Cramer calls the “hook” that hangs their essays and lists of extracurriculars together. “You don’t have to play the violin, be the first chair in your state, and rescue the whales. You can just pick one and be so good at it that you want to dare the admissions officers not to accept you and that they will regret it,” says Rim. No matter what, “we will find the story.”"

Milei has to keep control of the narrative

2023-12-14T19:16:00.000-08:00

See Argentina’s New President Has to Defuse an Economic Time Bomb by Moises Naim.

Moises Naim, who served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry in the early 1990s, is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. His latest book is “The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century.”

Excerpt:

"The key is to keep control of the narrative by telling a clear and compelling story about why reforms are needed despite their obvious short-term costs. Here Milei’s obvious gifts as a communicator could be crucial. Too often in the past, reform has been sold in the kind of dry, technical language that may convince economists but leaves voters befuddled. This is not a mistake the new president is likely to make. Telling and retelling the story of reform in language regular people can easily understand is what Milei lives for."

How Homer Foretold the Perils of Big Government

2023-10-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

By: Vance Ginn. He is president of Ginn Economic Consulting and chief economist or senior fellow at multiple think tanks across the country. He served as the associate director for economic policy of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, 2019-20.

After his post I have something on chess, Adam Smith and the movie "Jason and the Argonauts."

"In the tapestry of human history, one recurring thread stands out – the need for limited power in leadership.
As far back as the 7th century B.C., Homer explored this theme with remarkable insight in his timeless epic, "The Iliad." In modern-day America, where today’s leaders often assume too much power, Homer's lessons about the imperfections of inflated authority offer valuable insights. Recognizing the perils of excessive control, he creatively described what could be key to combating pressing issues today.

In "The Iliad," the gods of ancient Greece held dominion over justice and politics, not wholly unlike today's political leaders. Yet, Homer masterfully portrayed the limitations and imperfections of these gods, revealing that even the mightiest beings are not immune to human-like foibles.

These divine beings often acted out of self-interest. They were susceptible to basing actions on desires or petty grievances, making them appear more human than celestial. For instance, Zeus, the king of the gods, is reluctant to help the Trojans because of his disapproving wife, Hera, who strongly favors the Greeks. Zeus acts to maintain harmony, which is seen in Book IV of "The Iliad," when he contemplates helping the Trojans in battle but ultimately refrains from directly interfering. His hesitation reflects his complex role as the ruler of the gods, the upholder of fate, and his desire to manage the divine politics within Mount Olympus.

When not hoping to maintain marital harmony as Zeus did, the other gods often behaved out of concern for personal honor, which was highly valued in ancient Greece. The discord between Agamemnon and Achilles exemplifies this theme.

As the leader of the Achaean forces, Agamemnon believed he deserved the highest prize, Briseis, and was willing to oppress Achilles, a crucial warrior in the Trojan battle, to claim her. Achilles, in turn, prioritized his claim to Briseis over aiding the war efforts. Both placed their honor and pursuit of what they believed was rightfully owed to them above the collective well-being, jeopardizing the battle’s victory.

In one instance, Apollo admitted that his intervention wasn't driven by compassion for the Trojans but by a desire to protect his favored hero, Hector. This acknowledgment underscores the willingness of the gods to manipulate events for personal gain as opposed to the greater good.

The parallel between the gods of "The Iliad" and contemporary leadership is their susceptibility to act in self-interest. While the gods may seem all-powerful, their actions often reveal a profound concern for their agendas and favored heroes.

Although not as strong a principle today, personal honor preservation reveals itself in modern leaders through rent-seeking behavior. We see elected officials sometimes prioritize their agendas, party interests, or re-election prospects over the welfare of their nations and citizens. Just as Zeus was more concerned with appeasing influential people, politicians may succumb to surrounding pressure, foregoing long-term goals of improving the country.

Today's America faces numerous challenges, from mounting national debts to housing affordability, inflation, and stagnant wages. These issues often stem from government overreach and misguided policies, reminiscent of the interference of the gods in "The Iliad." It is crucial to recognize that unchecked government power can lead to a loss of personal liberties and economic prosperity.

In contemplating the lessons from Homer's "The Iliad," we discover that unchecked power carries inherent risks, whether in the hands of gods or modern leaders. Pursuing self-interest, personal glory, and re-election can overshadow the well-being of nations, leaving citizens to bear the consequences of misguided decisions. We must limit government power, embrace free markets, and prioritize the greater good derived from individual gain to mitigate these risks.

As the characters in Homer's epic grappled with the consequences of self-interested gods, we, too, must seek to promote paths that seek to empower the people and limit the government as our forefathers intended.

By doing so, we can create a world where the lessons of "The Iliad" guide us toward better governance and a brighter future. In heeding these ancient warnings, we can navigate the complexities of contemporary leadership and secure a more prosperous future for all."

This reminded me of the movie "Jason and the Argonauts." Honor Blackman (Hera) and Niall MacGinnis (Zeus) are playing a board game with pieces that represent people, gods or creatures in the story. If they move a piece on the board, the real version of that piece appears on earth and takes action and becomes part of the story.

This picture is from IMDB

Here is a passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Smith at the Library of Economics and Liberty. Smith emphasizes the arrogance and conceit of those who think they can arrange society any way they want. In a separate passage, Smith writes about how this can be dangerous (that follows this longer excerpt). First, Smith discusses the man of humanity and benevolence, then the man of system for contrast.

"The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder."

London School of Economics Professor Mary Morgan says storytelling continues to play a key role in economic analysis today

2023-10-09T09:09:00.002-07:00

See What is the role of storytelling in economics? Excerpt:

"Vignettes scattered through Adam Smith’s writing illuminate his arguments. Such thought experiments continue to play a key role in economic analysis today.
Economists are great storytellers. Their tales might be anecdotes of economic events that they have observed and which seem significant. More often, they are small, thoughtfully imagined stories about how the economic world works. Economists use these narratives to reason about why things happen in the way that they do – and perhaps what might happen next.

Where did this style of doing economic science come from? Well, maybe from Adam Smith, who is often seen as the father of the discipline."

She gives some examples from The Wealth of Nations, including his use of the the pin factory to demonstrate the value of the division of labor.

Is good business as much about storytelling as the stock market?

2023-09-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

See The Rise of the M.B.A. Novelist: A novelist who worked at Google and Goldman Sachs says the next generation of writers may be toiling away in tech and finance companies by Cecilia Rabess. She is the author of the new novel “Everything’s Fine.” She previously worked as a data scientist at Google and as an associate at Goldman Sachs. Excerpts:

"Could business really be the new breeding ground for literary talent? Although this point is so obvious it may not seem worth mentioning, I’ll say it anyway: publishing is a business, a multibillion-dollar industry where art and commerce collide. It’s also an industry in which corporatization, conglomeration, the digital revolution, disintermediation, thinning margins, relational gatekeeping, the myth of meritocracy, private equitization, the price of paper, social media, social stratification, educational elitism and shorter attention spans have led to what writer Will Blythe has called “the death of literary fiction.”
No wonder stories of economic precarity and income inequality are so popular right now. Tales of late capitalist woe are trending, and stories of rich people behaving badly have never gone out of style. This year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for example, was awarded to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” a story of institutional poverty in the American South, and Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” about Wall Street during the Great Depression.
M.B.A.s have a front-row seat to the boardroom drama. Good business is as much about storytelling as the stock market, and while you generally won’t find a classroom of M.B.A. students dissecting the finer points of a short story, the business “case”—a popular pedagogical tool that enlists empathy to practice problem solving—is not too far off. These are stories about beset employees or executives and they usually go something like this: A man named John is staring out of an office park window contemplating widgets. Inevitably he finds himself in a best-of-bad-options type of situation. There’s a ticking clock. A red herring. Discussion questions at the end. Alice Munro the business case is not, but it is ethos, pathos and logos, all the essential elements of story, if not style.
There’s another kind of story that business school privileges: stories of failure. M.F.A.s certainly tolerate failure, but M.B.A.s celebrate it. M.F.A.s are inevitably comfortable with rejection, but M.B.A.s romanticize and even fetishize failure. Fail fast, fail often. Fail better. Fail forward. In business there is almost as much advice for how to fail as how to succeed. Which is, of course, helpful and necessary in an increasingly competitive publishing landscape."
"An M.F.A. may teach students how to lay their souls bare on the page, but an M.B.A. teaches students how to market, sell and serve their souls up on a platter for public consumption."

Sell Me a Story

2023-06-01T08:02:00.001-07:00

In marketing, it’s no longer about demographic segments, but about ‘tribes.’ What’s wrong with brands preaching a ‘gospel’ about values?

Steven Poole reviews the book For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be by Marcus Collins. Excerpts:

"people drink a particular beer not only for its unique balance of hops and barley, but for what they believe the brand says about them.
"But what is culture, exactly? Mr. Collins calls it the operating system by which we live, and includes identity, shared language, social norms and cultural production—art, movies, fashion and branded products."
"we belong to “tribes” of shared beliefs and passions (skateboarders, say, or heavy-metal fans); many members of these tribes will gather in larger “congregations” (alternative-sports fans, festivalgoers). To these congregations, brands should preach a “gospel” about their own values. (It is ironic that many brands champion the value of nonconformity to persuade customers to adopt their uniform.) With this rhetorical scheme, the author continues the tradition of commerce borrowing the language of religious virtue."
"Some of Mr. Collins’s case studies illustrate win-win situations in which a surge in profits follows a socially positive campaign, as when Nike made the NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick the star of a 2018 campaign with the tagline “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Most endearing is the author’s account of some of his own marketing failures. Hired a few years ago to rejuvenate the soft drink Sprite—old tagline: “Obey your thirst”—his team made an ad with an updated slogan, “Only for the thirsty.” They had somehow overlooked that “thirsty” is now internet slang for being lustful or sex-starved. Twitter had a field day, and the ad was pulled within 24 hours. This, the author comments wryly, is a good example of failing to understand how cultural meanings have shifted."
"Those who associate with a brand’s values are more likely to buy from it, so brands should seek to “activate their tribes”—as if we don’t already have enough warring factions on social media and elsewhere."
"those who push culture forward and create new narratives for the rest of us—including the author’s beloved Jay-Z, the writers of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and so forth—are more than herd animals. They are making something new via the mysterious process of creation. Perhaps the product is, after all, sometimes more important than the messaging."

10 ways to improve your ads (with storytelling being a big part of it)

2023-04-20T19:03:00.002-07:00

By Paul Zak. Excerpts:

"The most important thing you can do to sustain neurologic immersion is to go back to English 101 and always, always, build a narrative arc for your commercial.

A montage of unconnected scenes may seem like a good way to evoke emotional attachment, but our data show that with the montage approach, within 10 to 15 seconds, the brain "gets it" and there is little reason to spend the metabolic energy to continue to be immersed. Low immersion shows that the information is unimportant and will not be remembered.

On the flip side, more immersion means more sales - because the brain values and remembers the content. Your commercial has to grab and grow immersion to be successful. A dramatic arc that introduces characters who face a dilemma that they then resolve keeps the brain immersed and wanting more. The data shows that a complete story arc can be done in as little as 6 seconds, so you don't need Tolstoy to write your script - and we all know you usually have 15 to 30 seconds to get your message across.

Regardless of the time you have, you do need to have product-story congruence. That is, the commercial must weave the product into the dramatic arc in a natural way. Many commercials tell wonderful stories and then just drop a "buy now"at the end. This does not cut it. Tell a story and make your product part of the plot."
"The story and those who embody it need to express genuine emotions that are absorbed by viewers and get them to care about your product as much or more than the many other things they care about. Solid narrative and writing, good actors and voiceover artists, and thoughtful directors are all necessary to create a hit commercial."
"What does drive brand awareness and sales? High and sustained immersion. For this, you need a story. Including a family who expresses emotions in a story is the way to generate an emotional "wanting" for the same experience. "
"Build a story around a pet and you can sustain immersion." "The pet, product, and story need to be congruent so that the puppy or kitty or pony is tied to the product. This is how to turn "awws" into dollars."
"stories rule and unrelated quick cuts drool. Client data show that nostalgic ads without a story do not sustain immersion and have little impact on sales.

Nostalgic stories, yes. Nostalgia because you think it looks pretty, no."

Farewells Masquerade As ‘New Adventures’

2023-04-10T12:34:00.003-07:00

See Is That Co-Worker Really ‘Off to a New Adventure’? Almost every goodbye message from a soon to be former colleague sounds like the start of something exciting. Don’t buy it by Callum Borchers of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The message just landed in your inbox or LinkedIn feed with all the cheer of a holiday greeting card:
I’m leaving to pursue new opportunities!
I’m excited for my next adventure!!
Can’t share the details yet, but stay tuned!!!
Sometimes, there really is something cool in the works, and the exit was purely voluntary. Often, the situation is a bit more complicated.
People who’ve been pushed out—or need a change after burning out or hitting a ceiling—seldom admit it up front. And the old saw about spending more time with family…well, didn’t we all do plenty of that during the pandemic everything-at-home era? Better to frame the end of a job as a triumph, or at least a step in the journey toward self-fulfillment.
So many of us want our jobs to reflect a sense of great purpose, which can make it unbearable to suggest that change is anything less than destiny calling.
“It corresponds to how much people now talk about following your passion and being authentic to your true self,” says Adam Galinsky, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School.
Vague, euphemistic announcements about chief executive officers’ departures are practically an art form. Walt Disney Co. recently thanked Bob Chapek for his leadership throughout the pandemic and said he had stepped down as CEO. There was no explanation other than that the “uniquely situated” Robert Iger was returning to lead the company. A press release didn’t mention that Disney executives and investors had alerted the board of directors to concerns about Mr. Chapek’s management.
Salesforce Inc. co-CEO Bret Taylor said a couple of weeks ago in a press release that he wants to “return to my entrepreneurial roots” and asserted that now—barely a year after his appointment—is the time to do just that. The abrupt career shift is hard to square with the company’s original plan for Mr. Taylor to help lead its next chapter, not to mention the tensions that had been growing between him and Salesforce co-founder (and now solo CEO) Marc Benioff, according to people familiar with the executives.
We nonbosses are carefully managing our farewell messages too, as if we were running investor relations at Me Inc. Controlling the narrative can feel especially important when many businesses are cutting staff, and as economists are warning of a looming recession.
“Nobody wants to appear injured in the marketplace,” or like damaged goods, says Dale Gibbons, a management consultant in Louisville, Ky."
"CEOs and corporations, which portray every transition as smooth and well-planned"
"many professional breakups are recast as the beginnings of thrilling new exploits."

Two Studies on the Importance of Founding Narratives to Entrepreneurial Pitch Success

2023-03-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

By Richard Gruss & Zachary A. Collier. They both teach at Radford University.

"Abstract

One crucial function of the entrepreneurial pitch is to alleviate investor uncertainty about committing funds to a startup in the early stages of development. New ventures rarely have sufficient hard data to substantiate their future success quantitatively, so investors often need a qualitative reason for putting their faith in the entrepreneur. Storytelling, as a powerful and time-honored method of transforming the intangible into the tangible, can go a long way toward establishing legitimacy and alleviating uncertainty. In this research, we empirically test whether the inclusion of an origin story in an entrepreneurial pitch significantly increases the probability of obtaining funding. This research consists of two studies. In the first study, we analyzed 486 pitches from six seasons of ABC’s Shark Tank and observed a significant relationship between the presence of a founder story and funding success. In the second study, we confirmed causality via a randomized controlled experiment. This finding has implications for entrepreneurs, in that it encourages them to concentrate on the narrative they are telling in their pitches. It also has implications for investors, in that it invites them to reflect on how important investment decisions might be swayed by presentational aspect of pitches."