Today at Barnes & Noble (which seems to only really specialize in everything that’s fiction) had the book Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism in their “economics” section (which was a 5’ by 5’ section). I contemplated on buying the book just based back cover’s description.
The global financial crisis has made it painfully clear that powerful psychological forces are imperiling the wealth of nations today. From blind faith in ever-rising housing prices to plummeting confidence in capital markets, “animal spirits” are driving financial events worldwide. In this book, acclaimed economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity.
Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government–simply allowing markets to work won’t do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life–such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes–and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for them.
Animal Spirits offers a road map for reversing the financial misfortunes besetting us today. Read it and learn how leaders can channel animal spirits–the powerful forces of human psychology that are afoot in the world economy today.
I don’t keep up with anything coming from the Keynesian side of economics (unless it’s discussed on Mises or LRC), so I thought about getting this book to see what they have to say about the current mess. What gets me is that they actually called the book Animal Spirits. At first I thought that maybe it was a critique on Keynesian economics and calling the book that to poke fun at them, but I’m wrong. I actually think it’s pretty ridiculous. A row under this book was The Road To Serfdom which must be a recent addition to that section…