Culturomics

Whizzes at Google & Harvard got together and Culturomics is the result. according to this scintillating Science article on the topic, 4% of the books that have ever been published are waiting to be analysed by you, right now. Here is an example of a search I ran to see how things got explained over the last century.

I searched for "psychological explanation" (red line), "sociological explanation" (blue line) and "evolutionary explanation" (green line). Nature appears to be in the ascendant, just overtaking nurture at the close of the century. Sociological explanations peaked in the 1970's, presumably just as the '68 generation came in from the streets and sat down at their desks. Interesting that psychological explanations took a dip around the 1930s. Anti-semitism, maybe?

Labor vs. labour economics

Further to Martin's post below, here is a comparison of labor economics with labour economics. It seems both are in decline. The blue line is labor. What caused the two series to almost converge in the early 1970s and then drift apart I wonder? I guess there will be a new discipline of culturometrics. Is that a word? It is now.

Behavio(u)ral Economics: What's in a Name?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

The above quotation from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is considered by some to indicate Juliet's concern that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention; it is what the name respresents that really matters. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the distinction between the spelling of behavioural economics in Europe, and behavioral economics in the United States. Previously I wondered whether this distinction really mattered; and now, to some extent, I know.

The source of my knowledge is http://www.culturomics.org/, a website which sifts through the hundreds of billions of words digitised as part of Google Books' effort to create a universal online library. Culturomics was reviewed this week in The Economist:

Anyone can now go to www.culturomics.org, type in a word or expression in one of seven languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese) and see for himself. Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and the lead author of a related study just published in Science (Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books)... (says) that twiddling with this new virtual widget is "addictive".

Putting the phrases "behavioural economics", "economic psychology" and "behavioral economics" into Culturomics produces the chart shown below (click on the image to see a bigger version). It can be seen that behavioral (the green line) has always been more popular than behavioural (the blue line). This provides some reason to believe that the American spelling of the discipline's name is quite important. Furthermore, this exercise underscores the importance of choosing key-phrases (or key-words) carefully, as discussed on this blog before here. Finally, it can also be seen that the phrase behavioral economics has overtaken economic psychology in popularity since the year 1998.


Addendum: Of course, it is also worth pointing out that some scholars view the phrase economic psychology to mean the psychological study of issues in the economic domain; and the phrase behavio(u)ral economics to mean the incorporation of psychological insight into economic theory. This is worth considering when interpreting the chart above.