The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

In the nineties, one or two people did suggest that irrational exuberance might be driven by a chemical. And then in 2000 Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan, bravely speculated that the dot-com bubble differed from previous ones because the brains of many traders and investors had changed—they were under the influence of now widely prescribed antidepressant drugs, such as Prozac. “Human nature has always given rise to booms and bubbles followed by crashes and depressions,” he argued. “But if investor caution is being inhibited by psychotropic drugs, bubbles could grow larger than usual before they pop, with potentially catastrophic economic and political consequences.”