{
  "id": "animal-spirits.urge",
  "term": "animal spirits",
  "sense": "urge",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 18,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "window",
  "definition": "The reading, kept across the members of a market, that their reach is large, which moves them to act before any model says where the walls are.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "morale.collective",
      "reach.action",
      "model.representation",
      "read.information",
      "keep.maintenance",
      "across.spatial",
      "member.social",
      "market.economic",
      "large.size",
      "motion.movement",
      "act.deed",
      "time.dimension",
      "says.speech",
      "wall.range-end"
    ],
    "interaction": "Action that no calculation settles still happens because members share a read of wide reach; when that read fails, action stops though the walls have not moved.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "action that runs ahead of its model",
      "an economy moved by a mood"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Keynes, in his 1936 General Theory, attributed much investment to animal spirits, 'a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction'.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "confidence.width",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "confidence reports the model's range as narrow; animal spirits act where no model is held"
    },
    {
      "id": "crisis-of-confidence.collapse",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "the same shared read, falling instead of holding"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "animal spirits"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-animal-spirits.urge"
}