Last week I had the chance to hear Bill Gates speak at the Harvard Business School Centennial, and he had some insightful comments about the economy. Granted, he has some pretty good sources … like a phone call the night before with Warren Buffett. 

From Gates’ perspective, we in the US ran an “interesting experiment”, where the economy as a whole was still fairly solid and in some ways separate from the recent credit crisis. What really caused the downward spiral, however (and according to his comments), was the three consecutive weeks of front pages and websites showing graphs of the Depression. In his mind, the downtown in consumer sentiment, inspired by the graphs/voices of a relatively small number of influencers, is where things really went awry.

What would happen if we paid a million workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to post more positive graphs all over the internet? It might be less expensive than the bailout, and help avoid creating what the WSJ today called one giant panic-transmission machine.