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A review by sam1972
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by Robert J. Shiller, George A. Akerlof
2.0
I was never fully clear on what was meant by 'animal spirits'. In the introduction its briefly described as "the thought patterns that animate people’s ideas and feelings", which is unhelpfully vague. Behavioral economics, of which this is said to be a quintessential example, is a supposed to be science. But the definition is so lacking in substance that their theory borders on the unfalsifiable.
Apart from that the book is *okay* for the most part. It falls off a bit towards the end, especially when they start talking about race in terms of stories. They essentially say that 'black people need special treatment because they feel bad, and we need to show favoritism to prove that we're on their side, regardless of the results of such policies.'
They even reject an entire book because it 'focuses too much on statistics' and 'not enough on stories'. But the reason we try to avoid stories in science is that its not a reliable indicator of frequency, and is often biased by the lens of the storyteller. This might be all right if all you're doing is trying to understand what people believe, but they authors go beyond that and assume that its a reliable indicator of actual life experience. The problem is that more than 50% of people believe their lives are harder than average, which is impossible. Similar errors abound in most of our self-reports, and should be used sparingly in science.
Apart from that the book is *okay* for the most part. It falls off a bit towards the end, especially when they start talking about race in terms of stories. They essentially say that 'black people need special treatment because they feel bad, and we need to show favoritism to prove that we're on their side, regardless of the results of such policies.'
They even reject an entire book because it 'focuses too much on statistics' and 'not enough on stories'. But the reason we try to avoid stories in science is that its not a reliable indicator of frequency, and is often biased by the lens of the storyteller. This might be all right if all you're doing is trying to understand what people believe, but they authors go beyond that and assume that its a reliable indicator of actual life experience. The problem is that more than 50% of people believe their lives are harder than average, which is impossible. Similar errors abound in most of our self-reports, and should be used sparingly in science.