what does history teach us about hegemony
Answers
Hegemony is political or cultural dominance over others. Leadership or predominant influence exercised by one one nation over others, as in a confederation
Answer:
With records of subjective wellbeing going back less than half a century, this column asks if we can know the impact of key past events on the happiness of our ancestors. It presents a new historical index that draws on millions of digitised books in the Google Books corpus of words using sentiment analysis. The index – which goes back to the 1776 US Declaration of Independence, 200 years earlier than any other index of happiness – makes it possible to analyse the historical drivers of happiness in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US.
Calls from UK Prime Minister David Cameron, the United Nations’ World Happiness Report, the OECD’s Better Life Index, along with psychologists and economists, all reflect on the need to develop a better understanding of subjective wellbeing (‘happiness’). Though many contemporary economies have tracked crime, education and economic production for the best part of a century, subjective wellbeing only began to become a staple of world economic indicators in the 1970s.
Unlike national income accounting, which initiated the collection of GDP in the 1930s, subjective wellbeing is a rather young indicator. Though there have been successful projects to roll back GDP (e.g. Bolt and van Zanden 2014, Broadberry 2015), attempts to construct historical series for wellbeing have been notably lacking. Without such a series, we are left wondering how wellbeing responds to key historical events, such as expansionary monetary policies, education and longevity.
But if constructing historical series for wellbeing makes sense, how can we extend existing measures when direct survey evidence was only initiated in the 1970s? The key insight in our new research paper (Hills et al. 2015) is that language conveys sentiment, and that the growing availability of digitised text provides unprecedented resources to construct a quantitative history of wellbeing based on historical language use.
In particular, the foundation of our work involves combining multiple large collections of texts of natural language going back two centuries with state-of-the-art methods for deriving public mood (i.e. sentiment) from language. The recent digitisation of books, newspapers and other sources of natural language – such as the Google Books Ngram database – represent historically unprecedented amounts of data (‘big data’) on what people thought and wrote over the past few centuries (see Michel 2011). These databases have already proved fruitful in detecting large-scale changes in language, which in turn correlate with social and demographic change, for instance in Hills and Adelman (2015).
These data offer the capacity to infer public mood using sentiment analysis. Deriving sentiment from large collections of written text represents a growing scientific endeavour. Examples include recovering large-scale opinions about political candidates, predicting stock market trends, understanding diurnal and seasonal mood variation, detecting the social spread of collective emotions, and understanding the impact of events with the potential for large-scale social impact such as celebrity deaths, earthquakes and economic bailouts (e.g. Pang and Lee 2008). Applying the same methods to historical text we can begin to produce more quantitative accounts of national happiness.
In the approach we take, sentiment measures are based on valence norms for thousands of words. These already exist in the literature and are collected from a large group of individuals who are asked to rate a list of words on how those words make them feel (e.g. Gilbert 2007). In the present case, valence norms based on the affective norms for English words have already been collected for five languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and German.
We applied these norms to the Google Books corpus for each of these languages, allowing us to derive a new index for subjective wellbeing going back to 1776, which we tentatively call the HPS index. An initial comparison with subjective wellbeing collected with survey data is shown in Figure 1. The data reflect the residuals after controlling for country fixed effects and clearly show a strong and significant correlation with our measure based on historical language.