Narrative Economics and Subjective Well-Being: A New Avenue for the Economics of Happiness

This Viewpoint argues that happiness economics can learn from narrative economics. Stories may shape well-being. They affect expectations, perceived security, and anxiety. They also create a broader emotional climate. Our approach enriches the findings on media effects and emotional framing by specifically anchoring the analysis in a well-established theoretical corpus: narrative economics. This is precisely what makes the approach seem, to us, both promising and novel. Natural Language Processing (NLP) offers a well-suited instrument for this work, although it is one methodological approach among several. This contribution is agenda-setting. We introduce a short illustration: an NLP analysis of French public-debt coverage.