Optimism in 2013 - Self-belief is our path to recovery

In his 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money back-in-fashion economist John Maynard Keynes used the phrase “animal spirits” to describe the emotions that shape human behaviour and the feelings that can be measured in terms of consumer confidence.

Keynes believed that “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”.

In other words, we sometimes have to think with our hearts, or to move it closer to the vernacular, we sometimes have to give it a lash despite overwhelming evidence that we might just be better advised to run away and wait to fight another day.