101 Business Ideas That Will Change the Way You Work

IDEA #32

Rational man is dead. Salute the animal spirit

Standard economic theory has been blown apart by the reality of our animal spirit.

What you need to know

The Nobel-laureate economist George Akerlof and Yale professor Robert Shiller began writing their lament of classical economists’ concept of the world in 2003 and, by the time they came to publish Animal Spirits in 2009 in the wake of the 2008 financial crises, their timing could not have been better. Their thesis builds upon John Maynard Keynes’ observation in his 1936 book The General Theory that how humans really behave cannot be standardised into simple formulae and models, ...