As foresight and futures studies depend on the pertinence of our knowledge of the present and the
past, this article tests whether the English language area may be adequately described as secularised
and capitalist between 1800 and 2000. We are using the Google Ngram Viewer to chart
and interpret time series plots of combined frequencies of pertinent keywords in the largest
Internet book corpus, the Google Books corpus. The results suggest that the English language area
is a secularised, politicised, scientificised, and ultimately also mediatised language area which
has never been dominated by the economy. We conclude that the sample period may not be
characterised as capitalist if we associate capitalism with any form of over-average importance or
even dominance of the economy and suggest that popular social macro trend statements be
regularly turned from implicit assumptions into explicit research questions so as to reduce the
risk that inadequate trend assumptions are projected into the future.