Wikipedia and Keynes on the animal spirits

I notice that in my own blogging culture, policing in particular seems to be a major driver of the animal spirits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)

Animal spirits (Keynes)
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"Animal spirits" is the term John Maynard Keynes used in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money to describe emotion or affect which influences human behavior and can be measured in terms of consumer confidence. Trust is also included or produced by "animal spirits". Several articles and at least two books with a focus on "animal spirits" have been published in 2008 and 2009 as a part of a so-called Keynesian resurgence.[1][2]

The original passage by Keynes reads:

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits - a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities."[3]

[edit] Notes
^ Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008. ISBN 978-90-5662-663-1
^ George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4008-3012-1
^ John M Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936, pp. 161-162.

[edit] References
John M Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan, 1936, pp. 161-162.
Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008. ISBN 978-90-5662-663-1
George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-4008-3012-1

[edit] External links
The Economist Economic terms: Animal spirits
A special report on the future of finance: Wild-animal spirits, The Economist, January 22, 2009
Robert J. Shiller, Animal Spirits Depend on Trust: The proposed stimulus isn't big enough to restore confidence, The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2009
Animal Spirits: Affective and Deliberative Processes in Economic Behavior, Loewenstein, George and O'Donoghue, Ted, Cornell University Working Paper 04-14

Comments

[TGGP]

Policing the blogger "Whiskey" often sets off my animal spirits. I think its because he deals with societal questions I think interesting and worth exploring, but just makes confident assertions without recourse to data, which in turns gives me something to look into more in-depth. Since with a lot of his claims I expect to reject his null hypothesis, that's a bonus.

[Hopefully Anonymous]

TGGP, interesting self-analysis.