All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology.

In the preface to a reissue of Mackay’s history of popular delusions, Baruch explains why economic models need an account of collective behavior. His next sentences say graphs and ratios are indispensable but insufficient, and he illustrates the problem with earlier speculative manias. The Congressional Record reproduces the passage during a 1948 Senate argument about foreign aid; that later political use is not the original occasion.

Market and economic behavior is driven by people acting collectively, not only by impersonal calculations or mathematical patterns.

The sentence does not say that analysis is useless: Baruch immediately calls graphs and business ratios indispensable. His objection is to treating price movements as geometry while neglecting crowd behavior.

• Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible—as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. (misattributed)
• No scientific statement is final: it is a likely formulation of observation and analysis. Carl Gustav Jung
• To love at all is to be vulnerable. C. S. Lewis
• Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtues consistently. Maya Angelou
• Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. Albert Einstein

Bernard Baruch, Congressional Record, Senate, 12 March 1948, vol. 94, p. 2628, quotation of Bernard Baruch’s preface to the 1932 L. C. Page & Co. edition of Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, p. 2628; PDF page 21. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/all-economic-movements-are-motivated-by-crowd-psychology/ (22 October 2026).

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