Bipolar Expeditions (38 page)

We actually will put our programs out there in a spectrum for the clients, saying [about the hunt], that this will produce the
biggest
high. The hunt will take people as a group and raise the energy level, the excitement, the laughter, the pump up … this particular program, the hunt, actually takes a group the highest.

Participating in the market can also induce mania.
¹⁵
In a
New Yorker
article from 2000, the “money issue,” David Denby writes of his obsessive goal to win a million dollars on the stock market by the year's end. He speaks of himself and others around him having become a “speed freak,” a “nut,” “driven by the tempo of the market, the pulsing, darting flow of money around the globe”; of “[t]he New Economy … producing a New Man who in imitation of the economy itself, is going through wrenching changes in the way he lives, works, buys and interacts with other people.” He feels “electrified and jubilant,” in the midst of a wild investment culture, an “overstimulated climate,” a “feverish mentality,” a mood of “bounding, thriving conviviality,” intoxicating eagerness, in short, in mania; possessed of a “new kind of personality,” “whose character has the liquid properties of cash.”
¹⁶

9.1. Joule Company trainees have found a store mannequin that will get them points in the scavenger hunt. Reproduced with permission.

9.2. Joule Company trainees earn scavenger hunt points by singing to a passerby in Cambridge. Reproduced with permission.

A pictorial representation of this mood appeared in a 2000 ad for Dynegy, an energy company that was expanding at the time. The ad copy appeared opposite a photograph of a man in a dramatic pose, his mouth stretched wide, his hair wild, his arms up, his fists clenched, his body under extreme tension: the ad copy read, “Surfing 60–footers at Waimea/speed climbing El Capitan/teaming across multiple disciplines to implement a cost-efficient yet flexible gas supply model/saving municipalities a bundle (whatever gets those endorphins going).” Business success is portrayed as a form of extreme sports, pursued with fanatic dedication and a driven energy.
¹⁷

One goal of these calls for mania is to stimulate creativity. Yet the creativity desired in the business world is of a particular kind. Take an article in the
Harvard Business Review
titled “The Weird Rules of Creativity.”
¹⁸
What is desirable about “weird creativity” is its immense activity, monumental productivity, risk taking, and innovation: “Creativity is a function of the
quantity
of work produced.”
¹⁹
Here creativity is fueled not by cognition but by the raw force of emotion—we might say it is fueled by animal spirits. Weird creativity is fostered not by rational management but by “shifting the rational approach 180 degrees,” as Steve Jobs does with what he calls his “reality distortion field.” Because this notion of creativity taps into emotional forces, it can be seen as the opposite of “rational.” But at the same time, recalling my discussion of the social conformity of mania and depression in the introduction, this notion of creativity
conforms:
it conforms to the demands of productivity as measured by the market.

Mania in the Market

Early in the twentieth century, writing soon after the Depression, John Maynard Keynes explained in no uncertain terms the importance of primitive emotions for the healthy functioning of markets.

9.3. A
New Yorker
cover in which money grows on trees and three men, one with a manic grin, collect it in baskets. Reprinted with permission.
New Yorker,
April 24 and May 1, 2000. Illustration by Winston Smith, courtesy of the
New Yorker,
Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities…. Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but mathematical expectations, enterprise will fade and die;—though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profits had before.
²⁰

Drawing on his understanding of Descartes, Keynes believed that people would make positive decisions when they were influenced by the spontaneous optimism of fiery animal spirits, and that they would fall into inaction when they felt fear in the wake of the animal spirits' departure.
²¹
He clearly implies that both optimistic and pessimistic calculations of benefit and loss might be equally reasonable: what differs most crucially is the psychological mood of the investor.
²²

In the decades since Keynes, references to the importance of animal spirits in stock markets have not been uncommon.
²³
Often mania, with its driven, exaggerated energy, stands in for Keynes's animal spirits. William Grieder's
One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism
is filled with references to “manic capital,” depression, and the calamitous consequences of both. As owners of capital and financial markets become more powerful, their search for ever higher returns becomes increasingly abstracted from social concerns and the practical realities of the market. They plunge forward optimistically into a period of manic investing until a panic or crash intervenes.
²⁴

Language that describes market cycles as manic depression is rampant in press reports. The drop and rapid recovery of the stock exchange in October 1997 was described as a mood disorder: “If Wall Street were a person we'd think he was mentally ill;”
²⁵
“The stock market was displaying classic signs of manic depression.”
²⁶
Similarly, during market swings in 1998, the
Los Angeles Times
quoted a stock analyst: “I've never seen anything like it, it's astounding…. Themar ket is hyper, manic-depressive.”
²⁷
The
Atlanta Journal and Constitution
referred to a “manic-depressive period in the market—a first quar ter with ‘manic' gains and a second quarter with ‘depressive' losses.”
²⁸
An Arizona paper weighed in, “In a manic-depressive economy where elation has been the prevailing mood, a whiff of fear is wafting not just through Wall Street but also through the rarefied air in technologycompany cubicles and office suites [of Silicon Valley].”
²⁹
Summing it all up was an ad for Netscape that juxtaposed young people, eyes dilated, arms stretched up, dancing at a rave, and traders bidding on the floor of the stock exchange.

As the ups and downs continued into 1999, James J. Cramer was quoted in the
New York Times:
“‘This market needs a double dose of Zyprexa [an antipsychotic now prescribed for manic depression] with some lithium laced in,' he wrote in a
TheStreet.com
column. ‘It has to stop the manic-depressive behavior before it drives us all crazy.'”
³⁰
Looking back on this period in a review of Cramer's 2002 book, David Denby reflects that investment strategies during the late 1990s “seem to have been designed for manic personalities.”
³¹
Indeed, Cramer is explicitly called “manic” in Howard Kurtz's book
The Fortune Tellers,
a judgment Cramer embraces: “I am a hard-driving, manic, emotional wild man who fights with everybody and craves respect.”
³²
Not surprisingly, Cramer's CNBC show,
Mad Money,
features his manic style.

In 1934, the economist Benjamin Graham invented a character called Mr. Market, and described his moody ups and downs in
The Intelligent Investor.
Drawing on this character, James Grant published a book in 1993 describing his experience as an Internet investment advisor with the task of minding “the mood swings of Mr. Market, the personification of all investors—a manic-depressive who gets wildly excited about stocks one day and deeply pessimistic the next.” In its review of Grant's book, the
Washington Post
commented, “Sure, mood swings offer good opportunities to score in the market—but it's hard to tell when Mr. Market's feelings might be justified. Analysts who have said for the past four years that Mr. Market is crazy now look crazy themselves.”
³³
Others dismissed the manic depressive analogy and its implications, even as they gave it new life: in “Mr. Market is a Manic-Depressive Idiot,” Bill Mann of the
Motley Fool
argued that tracking the short-term movements of one's stocks (which exposes the ups and downs of the market) is a mistake because “doing so hands over psychological power to an irrational source.” He argued instead that we should look at the market as a combination of myriad individual choices, some rational, some not, rather than grant it a personified and mythical status.
³⁴

9.4. An ad for Netscape juxtaposes young people dancing frenetically at a party with traders on the floor of the stock market. Copyright Netscape Communications Corporation, 2006. All rights reserved. Netscape and the Netscape logo are registered trademarks of Netscape in the United States and other countries.

As the term “bipolar disorder” became popular in the psychological realm, a
Wall Street Journal
writer picked it up in 2000: “We now have what I would call a ‘bipolar' economy. It's manic in the technology sector, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq rocketing past 5,000 last week and up 112 percent in the past 12 months. But it's increasingly depressive in the other sectors we lump together as the ‘Old Economy'…. The doctor who must treat this strange bipolar economy is Alan Greenspan. So far the Fed chairman has seemed more worried about the manic phase than the depressive.”
³⁵
John Heilman, author of a book on Silicon Valley, was interviewed on NPR's
Weekend Edition
in the context of the courts' challenge to Microsoft's monopoly practices: “It's almost like we've kind of entered this sort of period, in the media, at least, of sort of a collective bipolar disorder … you get these kind of manicdepressive swings from one side to the other.”