It's Friday Night! Party Time!   Time to relax, put your feet up on the couch, lay back, and watch some detailed videos on economic policy!

With all of the media spin on both economic indicators as well as health care, I thought this week we'd take a little diversion from economics to look at mass psychology and it's role in creating public perception and opinion.

A BBC Adam Curtis documentary, The Century of the Self delves into this topic. Mass psychology is also the father of marketing and public relations.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses psychological techniques to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population.