Animal spirits (Keynes)

"Physitions teache that there ben thre kindes of spirites", wrote Bartholomew Traheron in his 1543 translation of a text on surgery, "animal, vital, and natural.

William Wood in 1719 was the first to apply it in economics: "The Increase of our Foreign Trade...whence has arisen all those Animal Spirits, those Springs of Riches which has enabled us to spend so many millions for the preservation of our Liberties."

"[4]Thomas Hobbes used the phrase "animal spirits" to refer to passive emotions and instincts, as well as natural functions like breathing.

[5] Ralph Waldo Emerson in Society and Solitude (1870) wrote of "animal spirits" as prompting people to action, in a broader sense than Keynes's: A cold, sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation.

[8] The authors P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle were popular among public school boys in England before the Great War.

Though a hard reader, he was no bookworm, but an active, powerful young fellow, full of animal spirits and vivacity, and extremely popular among his fellow-students.There was, as a matter of fact, nothing much wrong with Stone and Robinson.

[10] Coates attributes this to fluctuations in hormonal balances; abnormally high levels of testosterone may create individual success but also collective excessive aggression, overconfidence, and herd behavior, while too much cortisol can promote irrational pessimism and risk aversion.

The author's remedy for this is to shift the employment balance in finance towards women and older men and monitor traders' biology.