#215) THE NARRATIVE KNOCKDOWN 3: We have a NEW CHAMPION!!! Ladies and Gentlemen, meet Dr. Paul Krugman, Narrative Beast!

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As stunning as Narrative Hercules (Jeremy Faust, M.D.) might be, we’ve found his match. Our new champion is not only narratively ripped, he has an Economics Nobel Prize to boot.

Narrative Hercules gets out-butted by our new Champion

Weaponizing the ABT

If you haven’t been following this series, it’s about our weaponization of the ABT Narrative Template into two metrics. The previous three posts will fill you in on it.

The ABT is now spreading into fields like business (see this list of the Top Six Models for Storytelling for CEOs), law (read this great article from lawyer Patrick Barone applying the ABT to legal argumentation), civil engineering (check out this page from folks at MIT) and lots of other disciplines. Furthermore, this fall for the 4th year in a row we’ll be teaching the ABT course at Emory University Medical School.

Now we’ve developed two simple metrics that gauge how much a given text is drawing on “the power of narrative.” You can read about them in-depth in our new book Lincoln But Trump.

The pattern: Bulging narrative metrics

So, we thought we had a complete outlier in MedPage Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Faust, author of Faust Files. He rings the NI (Narrative Index) bell at a staggering average of 47 — half again as much as the typical New York Times columnist (see graph below). We thought surely he can’t be beaten. We were wrong.

Look at his metrics. He averages 49 for the Narrative Index (versus 47 for Faust) and a super-charged 2.0 for his average AF (AND Frequency). That sort of AF score shows his narrative voice to be almost staccato, and definitely paratactic.

These results are somewhat surprising given that he’s a humble scholar (heavily informational folks don’t tend to score so high). But then knowing the power of narrative structure, it’s not surprising he has 4.6 million followers on Twitter/X.

Your interpretation: Once again, what does it mean? You tell us…

As I said last week, we’re making this stuff up as we go along. I’ve been at the metrics non-stop for a decade — since the publication of my 2015 book, Houston, We Have A Narrative, but we’re still working on making sense of it.

Back then I managed to find one person in the Democratic party, James Carville, who found it interesting. I connected with him when I hit the terrifying realization that Donald Trump’s NI average of 29 was double that of his opponent (14) who was a candidate who ran for president with no message. I talked about it in detail on Park Howell’s podcast the morning after Trump’s victory.

So, what does this new finding for Krugman mean? As always, we’re interested in your interpretation of what the data say.

Please email us any thoughts at: randyolsonproductions@gmail.com

Our Interpretation

We think these results for Krugman push back the boundaries and expectations for the highly educated crowd. The sky-high NI says that even the most erudite in our society can tap into the power of narrative structure to excite audiences with what they have to say.

It also means that Hillary Clinton, had there been people on her staff who knew these narrative metrics (there weren’t according to the bestseller “Shattered”), they could have shown her the weak scores, then pushed for revisions that could have matched her opponent (who is still dominating this country with the overwhelming power of his narrative intuition). Paul Krugman, Jeremy Faust, and I’m sure lots of others are narrative role models. BUT sadly … the vast majority of academics, scientists, and Democratic party speech givers aren’t.

And lastly, this stuff is essential for powerful communication. If you doubt it, just ask the South Park guys.

And if you want to check for yourself, here are the raw data …

Okay, who should we analyze for next week? You tell us.

We’ve established a chat thread for the discussion of THE NARRATIVE KNOCKDOWN and for you to post your suggestions of who we analyze for upcoming bouts of this weekly exercise. Let’s hear your thoughts!

“Science Publications” – Nature Climate, Bulletin of ASLO, IUCN Reports, Molecular Ecology. Error bars are Standard Error of the Mean, N = 25 for each bar, at least, letter grade ranges on the right.