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"Animal Spirits" is a new book by Robert Shiller and George Akerlof. It's sort of interesting that Shiller an Economist, refers to Psychology pretty often in this video from McKinsey http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/App_Themes/v2.0/swf/external_player.swfand also throws in Sociology and Political Science in the context of the current "fear" among both businesses and customers. It's sort of interesting that Schiller does not talk about business disciplines at all in the video but I hope does talk about in the book. For example ,Marketing ( an academic discipline that explicitly recognizes economics and psychology as "mother" disciplines) , Management (which draws a great deal from Sociology and informs Operations that studies Supply Chain) and Innovation (which is a lot about "Spirit" the human kind!). The fact is that Economics is a dominant discipline and has an annual Nobel Prize while no other liberal arts or business disipline does. Globally economists have powerful influence on public policy. And sadly, Econometric models without behavioral variables are unable to explain the current fear in the market as Schiller says. Time to look across disciplines !