Reviving animal spirits

Reviving the moribund economy must be our national priority. There's much to learn from 1991

John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1936, said that “most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive... can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.” But do we really have a problem with animal spirits? Why? And what can be done about it?

We have a problem

Consider two August 15s, 28 years apart: 1991 and 2019. In 1991, the Indian economy was a shadow of what it is today.

We were, then, the 19th poorest