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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. Robert J. Shiller, Co-Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics George A. Akerlof, Co-Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics Winner of the 2009 Book Award, getAbstract International Winner of the 2009 Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security, TIAA-CREF Winner of the 2009 Finance Book of the Year, CBN (China Business News) Financial Value Ranking Shortlisted for the 2009 Book of the Year, Financial Times//Goldman Sachs Business Featured on the Financial Times (FT.com)'s Books of the Year list Listed on Bloomberg.com in a review by James Pressley as two of "our favorite financial-crisis books this year." "Akerlof and Shiller are the first to try to rework economic theory for our times. The effort itself makes their book a milestone... And their book takes their case not just to economists, but also to the general reader. It is short (176 pages of text) and easy enough for laymen to understand."--Louis Uchitelle, New York Times Book Review "There is barely a page of Animal Spirits without a fascinating fact or insight."--John Lanchester, New Yorker "Akerlof and Shiller succeed, too, in demonstrating that conventional macroeconomic analyses often fail because they omit not just readily observable facts like unemployment and institutions such as credit markets but also harder-to-document behavioral patterns that fall within the authors' notion of 'animal spirits.' Confidence plainly matters, and so does the absence of it. When the public mood swings from exuberance to anxiety, or even fear, the effect on asset prices as well as on economic activity outside the financial sector can be large."--Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review of Books "Animal Spirits [is] ... the new must-read in Obamaworld."--Michael Grunwald, Time "[Animal Spirits] really applies to all the big areas where we need change."--Peter Orszag, Obama budget director (quoted from Time magazine article) "White House Budget Director Peter Orszag is a numbers guy, a propeller head as President Obama would say. But as David Von Drehle and I write in this week's print version of Time, Orszag has been spending his time recently reading not about spreadsheets, but about psychology. In particular, he has been reading a new book by the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller called Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives The Economy, and Why It Matters For Global Capitalism... We are, it turns out, slaves to the Animal Spirits. They have brought us to our knees. And now they are the only things that can save us."--Michael Scherer, Time.com's Swampland "In their new book, two of the most creative and respected economic thinkers currently at work, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, argue that the key is to recover Keynes's insight about 'animal spirits'--the attitudes and ideas that guide economic action. The orthodoxy needs to be rebuilt, and bringing these psychological factors into the core of economics is the way to do it... The connections between their thinking on the limits to conventional economics and the issues thrown up by the breakdown are plain, even if they were unable to make every link explicit. Even more than Akerlof and Shiller could have hoped, therefore, it is a fine book at exactly the right time... Animal Spirits carries its ambition lightly--but is ambitious nonetheless. Economists will see it as a kind of manifesto."--Clive Crook, Financial Times "An influential Democrat who was also one of the world's top-ten, highest-paid hedge fund managers last year thinks he knows which book is at the top of the White House reading list this spring: Animal Spirits, the powerful new blast of behavioural economics from Nobel prize-winner George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller."--Financial Times "Akerlof and Shiller remind us that emotional and intangible factors--such as confidence in institutions, illusions about the nature of money or a sense of being treated unfairly--can affect how people make decisions about borrowing, spending, saving and investing. Animal Spirits is an affectionate tribute to the man [John Maynard Keynes] whose ideas, unfashionable for the past 30 years, have resurged."--Nature "Animal Spirits is a welcome addition to our Hannitized national economic debate, in which anyone who advocates government spending risks being labeled a socialist... Animal Spirits is most compelling when the authors summon all the key behavioral patterns to explain vast, complex phenomena such as the Great Depression... Animal Spirits ... [is] aimed squarely at the general reader, and rightly so: Macroeconomics is now everybody's business--the banks are playing with our money."--Andrew Rosenblum, New York Observer "[A] lively new financial crisis book."--James Pressley, Bloomberg News "The two superstars have produced a truly innovative and bold work that attempts to show how psychological factors explain the origins of the current mess and offer clues for possible solutions. At a time when plummeting confidence is dragging down the market and the economy, the authors' focus on the psychological aspect of economics is incredibly important."--Michael Mandel, BusinessWeek "What Sigmund Freud did for the study of the mind, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller are doing for economics. Freud, healer or fake--take your pick--built a career and a field of medicine on the idea that people are driven by irrational forces. Akerlof, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, and Shiller, the Yale economist who is the eminence grise of the housing meltdown, argue that massive government market intervention programs are the only way to turn fear into enthusiasm for spending and investing--the 'animal spirits' that are an essential part of recovery... Akerlof and Shiller pick up on the idea of the emotional impetus to investment. With elegant reasoning and lovely prose, they demonstrate that we'll all be wallowing in misery unless governments around world, especially the in the G7 nations, help to return markets to optimism... Animal Spirits is a fine discussion of the last few decades of development of economic theory, especially monetary economics."--Andrew Allentuck, The Globe & Mail "[T]his book is rather more than the usual lament about the failings of economics. Its authors are two of the dis

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Part One: Animal Spirits Chapter One: Confidence and Its Multipliers 11 Chapter Two: Fairness 19 Chapter Three: Corruption and Bad Faith 26 Chapter Four: Money Illusion 41 Chapter Five: Stories 51 Part Two: Eight Questions and Their Answers Chapter Six: Why Do Economies Fall into Depression? 59 Chapter Seven: Why Do Central Bankers Have Power over the Economy (Insofar as They Do)? 74 Postscript to Chapter Seven: The Current Financial Crisis: What Is to Be Done? 86 Chapter Eight: Why Are There People Who Cannot Find a Job? 97 Chapter Nine: Why Is There a Trade-off between Inflation and Unemployment in the Long Run? 107 Chapter Ten: Why Is Saving for the Future So Arbitrary? 116 Chapter Eleven: Why Are Financial Prices and Corporate Investments So Volatile? 131 Chapter Twelve: Why Do Real Estate Markets Go through Cycles? 149 Chapter Thirteen: Why Is There Special Poverty among Minorities? 157 Chapter Fourteen: Conclusion 167 Notes 177 References 199 Index 219