积极的心态有利于经济回复?

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Well, right now, we wanna look for some silver linings in the latest economic numbers, well, more than a half million jobs were lost last month, and the unemployment rate clicked closer to 9%, that is better than most that predicted, and a recent ABC news poll finds majority of Americans now view their financial situation positively, that's a nine-month high, could we be starting to crawl out of all this recession talking, and how can we even control how fast we recover with attitude.

 Robert Shiller is the co-author of a fascinating new book called Animal Spirits, how human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism, and also teaches economics to the Yale. Good to see you. Thanks for being with us this morning.

So your book points out that a lot of free market economists have been operating under the assumption for years that human beings are rational creatures, Eh, and if you’ve ever raised kids, we know that's certainly not the case. How much is confidence a driver in a recession like ours?

Well, most economists will say “not at all”, but we believe, George Akerlof and I, that it’s major mover, and you know, I think we're kind of in think with most people’s intuitions: what's going on in the economy, why do we get in this terrible mess, and why…might we be coming out of it, it’s in our mind, it’s our optimism or confidence or willingness to take adventures and economic risks.

Right, fears sense of fairness well, and you also point out that people really relate to a narrative story, you tell me a story that, for example, we’ve run Stress Test on banks, and they’re healthy, and we’re not gonna let them fail, and things are getting better, and we can wrap our minds around like that, and it ultimately becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The really big story is Barack Obama, our first minority president, inspirational charismatic person, and the leap in the stock market may have no better explanation than his presidency, it’s the same thing that happened under the Roosevelt presidency, the stock market soared when he became president.

Right, but for those who just lost their jobs, it’s a very different story on the micro level. So how should we think about this, when will we know based on your consumer confidence models, those numbers that we hit bottom and we're on our way up?

Well, confidence is up, especially in the Michigan survey, the long run confidence, and that's the one that matters the most, unfortunately, it’s a long story, and these things evolve over months and years, and we really don’t know at this point, confidence jumps around, depending on news and who knows what.

Right, you point back to early 80s, when there were gas lines, high inflation, and people were mad because every time they left their houses, they saw proof  that seem like America was crumbing. We don’t have that right now, and that can be a big help, right?

Yeah, I think that in the 70s and 80s when inflation was building up, people had real shocks to their Animal Spirits, they thought that we were going the way of some developing countries that had lost control, inflation out of control was viewed as fundamentally unfair, and fundamentally damaging to the whole fabric of this country, and it’s a bigger shock to the general national psyche that we'd actually gone through recently.

So ultimately it’s not the worst thing we’ve seen since the Great Depression, and that itself is encouraging. The book is Animal Spirits. I appreciate for your time. Thanks again.

My pleasure.

Vocabulary

1.      mover                             发动机 推动器         

2.      prophecy                         n.预言, 预言能力             

3.      hit bottom                        vi.触得到底,达到最坏的程度             

4.      fabric                             n. 机制 结构 组织