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Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

dutchreview.com

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Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#41

Post by Hilliard_Ohiooo »

silotis wrote: post #14

The brief mention that the fallout wasn't as disastrous as myth would have it greatly understates just how exaggerated the popular account of tulip mania is. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

So many of these articles get it completely wrong. Economically. People weren't going crazy for tulips just because, the government had incentivized investment in tulips. The government at the time basically told people that they could not lose money on investing tulips. It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania which it was not.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#42

Post by throw0101c »

When Quinn and Turner wrote their book Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles they concluded Tulipmania was not a bubble and so did't include it:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/48989633-boom-and-bus...

Quinn did an AMA when the book was published (2020):

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/i2wfsm/i_am_...

* Book talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLl3Ijb01I0

Garber does have it though, along with Mississippi and South Sea:

* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262571531/famous-first-bubbles/

See also perhaps Perez's book on tech hype and bubbles (starting with Canalmania):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_Revolutions_and_...

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#44

Post by ses1984 »

somenameforme wrote: post #9
shiandow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reaso…

> 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

Isn’t that what all the biggest bagholders thought?

How else do you explain anyone still holding a worthless NFT they spent thousands on?

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#45

Post by root-parent »

brap wrote: post #37
iambateman wrote: post #33

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

No different from bitcoin...

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#46

Post by hodder »

brap wrote: post #37
iambateman wrote: post #33

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

brap wrote: post #37
iambateman wrote: post #33

Maybe we should update our lexicon to "NFT mania" –– far more people lost money in that phenomenon.

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess. Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

[deleted]

Re: Tulip mania: when a single flower was worth more than a house (2025)

#48

Post by root-parent »

phaser wrote: post #43

I didn't learn anything about tulips, markets, or the tulip market in this article.

If you want to learn about crowd insanity read Nietzsche, if you want to learn about bubbles read about 1998 to 2001 and the current AI bubble. Both were and will be worst than 1929.
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