18th December 2010
Google’s Ngram Viewer: The new story teller of history
Two blog posts guided me to this brilliant innovation (this and this).
I'm picking the diagram below as the clearest depiction so far that socialism is DYING.
The ngram tool is found here. It is essentially a moving history of the proportion of the selected word – out of the total words written in books in the past few hundred years – calculated using Google's massive database of Google Books.
While one would be foolish to imagine that this data represents serious research, since words mean different things over the course of time to different people – the results below are very promising, nevertheless. The results might be taken to mean that (1) SOCIALISM IS DEAD (or dying!), and (2) LIBERALISM is on the ascendant.
However, this interpretation is perhaps premature. I would suggest that a lot of work lies ahead to fully demolish and bury socialism, particularly when a billion Indians keep voting for socialists every year.
ADDENDUM
A broadly similar trend on comparing John Locke and Karl Marx:
