Reply #7: Phil Gramm's comment was both an outrage and a tautology [View All]

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

Bad times are, in one sense, all in people's heads insofar as EVERYTHING in a modern economy is to some degree in people's heads... even our placing value on currency is an attitude that people can lose faith in, as happens from time to time with disasterous effects.

Of course Gramm could have said just as meaningfuly that World War II was all in people's heads in that a change in mass psychology would have stopped it in its tracks.


You are quite right that social structures form templates that individual psychologies grow into. And, as with so many things like this, nature v. nurture is not very important when the effect is indistinguishable—when all human societies happen to incorporate certain modes those are defacto human nature.

(Or social nature... there are probably some emergent traits of society that are implied by individual psychology en masse, including many that would be difficult or impossible to extrapolate from individual nature.