"Animal spirits" is the term John Maynard Keynes used in his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment,

Interest and Money to describe emotions which influence 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" were published in 2008 and 2009 as a part of the 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] Keynes seems to be referencing David Hume's term for spontaneous motivation. The term itself is drawn from the Latin spiritus animales which may be interpreted as the spirit (or fluid) that drives human thought, feeling and action. Expectations and planning Households and firms decide their behavioural plan depending on events which are occurring in the current period and on expectations of events which will happen in the future. Their planning is not confined to the present only; they will decide on plans for the coming several weeks simultaneously with that for the current week. In the present market, however, only that part of this long-run planning which concerns current needs is carried out. It is, of course, impossible that the remaining part, concerned with the future, is carried out in the present week; that part of the planning concerned with the next week, week 1, will become effective in the next week but it will not necessarily be carried out in the same way as was decided in the present week, week 0. Obviously one week has elapsed between week 0 when the long-run planning was decided and week 1 when the relevant part of that planning is carried out and therefore some data will have changed. Unexpected changes may occur in the individual's tastes or in the available techniques of production; also the view of future economic events may have changed during that lapse of time. Therefore as time goes by each individual and each firm will not necessarily implement the plan as it was decided. It will be examined and revised at the beginning of each week. Thus economic plans depend on expectations about the future as well as on current events. Graph explanation : the chart below shows, the higher your anticipated fears the lower your anticipated returns and vice versa Apple graph : Every single year Wall Street expectation for Apple are almost 50% lower than what Apple ends up reporting. Unfortunately for Apple investors, Apple trades on future expectations. Thus, every year that goes by, investors ignore the fact that Apple just beat the consensus by 50% and then trades on flawed forward expectations.

ACCELERATOR EFFECT The accelerator effect in economics refers to a positive effect on private fixed investment of the growth of the market economy (measured e.g. by a change in Gross National Product). Rising GNP (an economic boom or prosperity) implies that businesses in general see rising profits, increased sales and cash flow, and greater use of existing capacity. This usually implies that profit expectations and business confidence rise, encouraging businesses to build more factories and other buildings and to install more machinery. (This expenditure is called fixed investment.) This may lead to further growth of the economy through the stimulation of consumer incomes and purchases, i.e., via the multiplier effect. The accelerator effect also goes the other way: falling GNP (a recession) hurts business profits, sales, cash flow, use of capacity and expectations. This in turn discourages fixed investment, worsening a recession by the multiplier effect. The accelerator effect fits the behavior of an economy best when either the economy is moving away from full employment or when it is already below that level of production. This is because high levels of aggregate demand hit against the limits set by the existing labor force, the existing stock of capital goods, the availability of natural resources, and the technical ability of an economy to convert inputs into products.

The accelerator effect

Planned capital investment by private sector businesses is linked to the growth of demand for goods and services. When consumer or export demand is rising strongly, businesses may increase investment to expand their production capacity and meet the extra demand. This process is known as the accelerator effect. But the accelerator effect can work in the other direction! A slowdown in consumer demand can create excess capacity and may lead to a fall in planned investment demand.

A good example of this in recent years is the telecommunications industry. Capital investment in this sector surged to record highs in the second half of the 1990s, driven by a fast pace of technological advance and huge increases in the ICT budgets of corporations, small-to-medium sized businesses, and extra capital investment by the public sector (including education and health).

The telecommunications industry invested giant sums in building bigger and faster networks, but demand has slowed in the first three of the decade, leaving the industry with a vast amount of spare capacity (an under-utilisation of resources). Capital investment spending in the telecommunications industry has fallen sharply in the last three years the accelerator mechanism working in reverse.

Accelerator Principle The idea that a small change in consumer behavior can have a large effect on a company's investment. For example, suppose $100 of investment in a bakery produces $100 worth of baked goods. If consumers usually buy $100 of baked goods each year but this increases to $110, the bakery must buy 10% more equipment, baking materials, and so forth, which can increase the amount it invests in its suppliers by more than 10%.

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

Author(s)

George Akerlof and Robert Shiller