title: Books average previous decade of economic misery.
abstract: For the 20(th) century since the Depression, we find a strong correlation between a 'literary misery index' derived from English language books and a moving average of the previous decade of the annual U.S. economic misery index, which is the sum of inflation and unemployment rates. We find a peak in the goodness of fit at 11 years for the moving average. The fit between the two misery indices holds when using different techniques to measure the literary misery index, and this fit is significantly better than other possible correlations with different emotion indices. To check the robustness of the results, we also analysed books written in German language and obtained very similar correlations with the German economic misery index. The results suggest that millions of books published every year average the authors' shared economic experiences over the past decade.
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: R Alexander
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Bentley
authors.affiliation: Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Alberto
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Acerbi
authors.affiliation: Volterra Partners LLP, London, United Kingdom ; Anthropology Dept, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ormerod
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lampos
mesh_terms: D001877:Books; D003132:Commerce; D005858:Germany; D008091:Literature; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States