Animal Spirits
Reading collective economic affect across three regions
Leon Tan ¹ ²
1 Unitec Institute of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand; 2 Propensities
KEYWORD
#collective affect #coupling dynamics #data visualisation
#assemblage theory #behavioural economics
Animal Spirits reads collective economic affect as something markets are made of, rather than a distortion within them. Three signals — what people look up, what markets do, what the news says — are tracked across the United States, the United Kingdom and India, and the instrument renders the relationship between them: aligned, co-moving, or coming apart. Following Keynes rather than Akerlof and Shiller, it treats affect as constitutive rather than deviant. It does not predict, diagnose, or assign cause. It makes perceptible a relationship that no financial dashboard shows.
CREATIVE PROCESS
Built entirely from zero-cost public APIs on a substitution architecture: each source sits behind a replaceable accessor, so richer data can enter without disturbing the coupling model or the visual grammar above it. Hue carries channel identity only — amber attention, blue market, purple narrative — so regime is expressed through value and geometry, never through colour.
IMPLICATIONS & NEXT STEPS
The instrument observes at daily resolution; only narrative carries genuine intraday variation, and that asymmetry is documented rather than concealed. The backend logs continuously, and the accumulating record will support calibration of attractor positions per region — and the harder question of whether one coupling model can be pluralist, or whether pluralism needs different models.
References
Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2009). Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism. Princeton University Press.
DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage theory. Edinburgh University Press.
Keynes, J. M. (1936). The general theory of employment, interest and money. Macmillan.