Man, this book is depressing

This final note today, just because we don’t have enough economic indicators to tell you about. Researchers over in the UK have come up with a literary misery index.

They cross referenced the word choices in 5 million books — thank you Google digitization — and came up with their index by comparing sad words minus happy words.

Lo and behold, bad economic times do show up in literature, but — and this is the depressing part — there’s about a ten year lag.

So books in about five years are gonna be really depressing.