Another example of how today, it’s all connected. We can’t speak authoritatively about changing human behavior if we don’t understand human psychology. To successfully implement DIY Education and DIY Healthcare, we thus need to wade into psychology, and this paper takes that connection further in suggesting how human psychology is related to “the Economy”. “Animal Spirits” as defined by Keynes:
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.
One perhaps can read into “animal spirits” as a tip off that economics is not the purely statistical and mathematical grasp of the world we might imagine it to be. DIY activities like digital healthcare and eLearning will need to be aligned with those “animal spirits” which Keynes says are “spontaneous urges to action”. While we already know that in the US, healthcare and education are two huge components of the economy, what happens when we transfer some of the responsibility for those activities to the individuals involved, and away from huge bureaucracies?
It says here, we’ll be spending more time understanding “animal spirits” as we move in that direction, and that eventually, we’ll have a clear understanding of how they relate to digital impetuses.
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