Abstract

Emotions drive economy in many directions. This driving force and power of our collective but wildly diverse sentiments is mostly because the future cannot be known in advance. If I said this about democratic politics where uncertainty is usually taken for granted, no one would blink. Reason can guide emotional responses toward feelings of anxiety, hope, or caution, although everyday conjectures are quite a pastime. We have a love–hate relationship with uncertainty, with one exception: most economists grandly exclude their “predictions.” Few are candid about the uncertainties not from politics but from economic relations in which emotions are necessarily involved. More to the point, economic leaders demand certainty over these relations, an unreasonable and irrational demand. In this dangerous if not despotic sense, homo economicus is an escape from reason but never from emotions. And there are emotions specific to modern economies from competition and opportunism, unlike the emotions of fatalism or sharing in other economic arrangements. Along with imagination and values, emotions have given capitalism its dynamism, its restless energy, and interminable conflicts. The questions then are which emotions and what is economy?

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