Psychology or Economics The Passions

The economic situation is one of the issues that most concern these days, it's palpable in the number of items we can find about it online. Debt restructuring, financial sector failures, subprime mortgages and many others try to explain how you got here and what are the prospects for the future. Economy like me little or nothing, I tend to read these articles from my training: as a psychologist and psychoanalyst.



In general, two issues have interested me for quite some time about the manifestations of the psychological aspect in the economic field. One is the claim that one of the elements in which economic growth is based on human consumption and the other one of the factors of the current crisis is the indebtedness of the population. That is, the economic system rests heavily on us to buy and the financial sector draws to sell money for it.



Human psychology is very complex and yet it is perceived as almost trivial. All items found on any subject, fast and simple comments of professionals interviewed in a TV program, research linking a pair of variables and arrive at conclusions that it feels obvious that this is a discipline all by experience own, we know quite well. The reason is that the more complex case of this discipline in the office, when we have to work with what is not reproducible in a laboratory or a quantifiable test.



So, despite the apparent simplicity of the psychological assumptions, however, is precisely what gives the psychological factor for the economic forecasts fret. In a way, economics is the attempt to calculate and predict human behavior, as the market finally eats them. Human passions are what lead us to buy or sell, migrate, study, work, marry, have children, start a business, etc.. Under what conditions make such decisions, it is essential for any project economic. Mathematical formulas that account for some fluctuations and market rates, they hide behind such behavior, a universe of infinite possibilities.



It often seems that when it comes to economy we mean an autonomous body that continues on to fulfill a purpose, sometimes the body takes the form of politicians in power. While all this is true, as it is true that the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts, it is interesting to pause and reflect that which feeds the market are our passions, fears, desires, jealousies, rivalries, and perhaps the most important psychological factor in the economic result: imitation, or if you will, spread. If we drop a ball of paper in a crowded place while shouting: grenade!, It is likely that there will be a stampede to end the lives of many. Perhaps the goal was to disperse the crowd and this will have been finally completed, with some collateral damage.



Even when we have gone through a similar situation, even if we do not fall into the trap, others will, and history will be repeated in their own version, here one of the unpredictable: when and how to update the same factors determine an outcome similar to the above. So always triggered crises in a temporality and modality of its own. For example, the housing bubble would explode at some point, but do not know when or the extent of the crisis and, especially, the speed of recovery.



Human beings forget quickly, it serves a defensive function. For example, we forget most of the time that we are mortal beings and therefore act as if we were to live forever. We forget the pain suffered early because otherwise it would cost even more to get up every day. This explains that we forget that our parents or our grandparents and ourselves, we have gone through a situation of economic crisis. Thus, if all around us are buying your home, envy their happiness and rushed to buy ours. In this sense, psychoanalysis posits that forgetting is precisely the path that leads directly to repeat and repeat is recalled, and in remembrance, but to act.



In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics "for having integrated the progress of psychological research into economic science, especially in regard to human judgments and decision-making under uncertainty." I have not read the work of this man but it is surprising that this interrelationship between economics and human psychology remains, in practice, so ignored in most articles circulating on the internet, and I doubt that they are taken into account when implementing policies economic



Let us make one last comparison: if the economy based their predictions on statistical curves and probabilistic laws, psychology does the same through profiling. So, they end up moving under these representative models used to predict and / or diagnose. The reason why many times these predictions and diagnoses are not successful is that there is something incalculable and indefinable that we back the tide. For the psychologist who works at the clinic, especially for the psychoanalyst who works beyond the profiles, the skill is to know your operation unknown, making it appear as part of the office. When man suffers, as opposed to the economy each particular case taking as collateral damage of that which can not handle, the psychologist works with the suffering that is not shareable, nor measurable or estadarizable. Suffering is unique, although the reason may be similar: a break of a couple, a job failure, the way to go through the will, for every human being is different. On the other hand, the variables involved for a person one way and not another are countless and always, in any attempt to define some always escapes, is the sign of the absolute difference that defines us