Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
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Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#2You know, we also have the tulips of our time...
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#3I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price.
The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, but does anyone have better knowledge of the state of our understanding of the history of tulip prices?
Edit: the top comment provided what I had been thinking of. My account above about profits wasn't right, because the trades were never fulfilled. When prices went too high, people didn't honour their contracts and that was that. No one went bankrupt. And as the bulb owners had bought at lower prices they also were fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48322546
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#4I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
Are you asking because you think the LSAT is at odds with the article's description of the mania? Because it is not.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#5For a wider context, if needed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...>
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#6I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
By that definition every pyramid scheme is rational (of course only until you run out of greater fools).
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#7I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
There are so many of these breeding ponzi schemes every few years. Guinea pigs, "rare" snakes, long distance pigeons, you name it. They are all ponzis regardless of the animal reproducing, with the added benefit that instead of just being part of a financial scam you can also be part of animal abuse, because most people don't give two shits about the animal, mess it up, abandon them later, etc.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#8I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
That logic has a glaring flaw, that while tulips might be in short supply, the price is driven by everyone else doing that too, so there'll be a glut of new blubs in the future, so the future price shouldn't be assumed to be the current price.
Anything self-replicating can't hold to "current price best predicts future price".
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#9I teach the LSAT and one of the passages is famously about this mania and contends that it was actually rational. You paid a high price for a tulip bulb, planted it, and then sold the descendants which paid off the original price. The narrative from this article seems to be largely based on Thackeray's book from 1841. Wikipedia suggests the LSAT passage is modern scholarly received wisdom at least in some quarters, b…
Are you asking because you think the LSAT is at odds with the article's description of the mania? Because it is not.
The article suggests people genuinely believed a tulip was, implicitly for the foreseeable future, worth more than e.g. a house. That suggests it was some sort of mania over rationality.
The NFT thing is comparable. I think most of everybody investing understood that they were worthless and that it was a bubble, but there was a remote chance that it wasn't a bubble and even if it was a bubble then you'd still a reasonable chance of making a profit, and even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses. Nobody thought there was any remotely high chance of a poor quality rendering of an ape being worth more than a house for the indefinite future. It was just speculation, sometimes poorly and sometimes reasonably measured.
Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)
#10Bitcoin circa 2018-2019.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1574985600&dateRange=custom&...