Fun with Google Trends

[Student]

I was just messing around with Google trends during my lunch break and decided to see which great economist of the 20th century got the most searches during the financial crisis of 2008. Below you will find the results for Milton Friedman (yellow), John Maynard Keynes (blue), Ludwig von Mises (red), and Friedrich von Hayek (green).

Everyone seemed to get a bump after Lehman Brother filed for Chapter 11 in September. But obviously some bumps were bigger than others. I was not too surprised that Keynes beat out Mises and Hayek. Like Russ Robert’s macro-econ-rap video lampoons, Keynes is lauded almost to the exclusion of Hayek. However, I was very surprised that searches for Milton Friedman beat out Keynes.

Potential explanations? A lot of journalists writing feature articles on how the financial crisis showed how foolish and evil Milton Friedman was (Naomi Klein type stuff).

Alternative explanation? Depressed economists at the University of Chicago were googling Friedman like it was intellectual comfort food. This is evidenced by the fact many of the Friedman searches were concentrated in Illinois. [:O]

Most people probably won’t care, but I actually found this kinda neat. lol plus google trends is just way cool. [H]

[Bodia]

I tried to play with Google trends in cyrillic (russia, ukrainian, bulgarian). I also have added to that list Marx. I exluded Mises (his results was near 0, and his name isn’t the same in different languages). Here the comparative results during 2009 (the times before the results was much more less relavant):

Marx(green) - 100, Hayek(blue) - 44, Friedman (orange) - 13, Keynes(red) - 1.