@article{discovery1417388,
          number = {1},
            year = {2014},
          volume = {9},
           month = {January},
           pages = {--},
           title = {Books Average Previous Decade of Economic Misery},
       publisher = {Public Library of Science},
            note = {{\copyright} 2014 Bentley et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.},
         journal = {PLoS ONE},
            issn = {1932-6203},
             url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0083147},
          author = {Bentley, AR and Acerbi, A and Ormerod, P and Lampos, V},
        abstract = {For the 20th 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.}
}