Animal spirits and viral popular narratives

Abstract

John Maynard Keynes's (1936) concept of "animal spirits" or "spontaneous optimism" as a major driving force in business fluctuations was motivated in part by his and his contemporaries' observations of human reactions to ambiguous situations where probabilities couldn't be quantified. We can add that in such ambiguity there is evidence that people let contagious popular narratives and the emotions they generate influence their economic decisions. These narratives are typically remote from factual bases, just contagious. Macroeconomic dynamic models must have a theory that is related to models of the transmission of disease in epidemiology. We need to take the contagion of narratives seriously in economic modeling if we are to improve our understanding of animal spirits and their impact on the economy.