Animal Spirits

Akerlof and Shiller are the first to try to rework economic theory for our times. The effort itself makes their book a milestone.
(Louis Uchitelle New York Times Book Review)

There is barely a page of Animal Spirits without a fascinating fact or insight.
(John Lanchester New Yorker)

Akerlof and Shiller succeed, too, in demonstrating that conventional macroeconomic analyses often fail because they omit not just readily observable facts like unemployment and institutions such as credit markets but also harder-to-document behavioral patterns that fall within the authors' notion of 'animal spirits.' Confidence plainly matters, and so does the absence of it. When the public mood swings from exuberance to anxiety, or even fear, the effect on asset prices as well as on economic activity outside the financial sector can be large.
(Benjamin M. Friedman New York Review of Books)

Two of the most creative and respected economic thinkers currently at work, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, . . . [have written] a fine book at exactly the right time.
(Clive Crook Financial Times)

A truly innovative and bold work. . . . At a time when plummeting confidence is dragging down the market and the economy, the authors' focus on the psychological aspect of economics is incredibly important.
(Michael Mandel BusinessWeek)

Animal Spirits [is] . . . the new must-read in Obamaworld.
(Michael Grunwald Time)

In their new book, two of the most creative and respected economic thinkers currently at work, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, argue that the key is to recover Keynes's insight about 'animal spirits'--the attitudes and ideas that guide economic action. The orthodoxy needs to be rebuilt, and bringing these psychological factors into the core of economics is the way to do it. . . . The connections between their thinking on the limits to conventional economics and the issues thrown up by the breakdown are plain, even if they were unable to make every link explicit. Even more than Akerlof and Shiller could have hoped, therefore, it is a fine book at exactly the right time. . . . Animal Spirits carries its ambition lightly--but is ambitious nonetheless. Economists will see it as a kind of manifesto.
(Clive Crook Financial Times )