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

Post by tokai » Fri, May 29, 2026, 4:08 PM UTC

kaon_2 wrote: post #62

Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replac…

Post by tokai » Fri, May 29, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

iambateman wrote: post #33

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

Post by tokai » Fri, May 29, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #76

Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

The "government" didn't do much at all, there was no real oversight or guarantee like there is today. The whole concept was novel at the time so there was no law and there were no real procedures. The Dutch Republic may not have had an official king, it also sure wasn't a democracy with real, independent institutions or anything like that. The country was led by a democracy-lite system of nobility/rich people that fe…

Post by soperj » Fri, May 29, 2026, 4:26 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #76

Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

The "government" didn't do much at all, there was no real oversight or guarantee like there is today. The whole concept was novel at the time so there was no law and there were no real procedures. The Dutch Republic may not have had an official king, it also sure wasn't a democracy with real, independent institutions or anything like that. The country was led by a democracy-lite system of nobility/rich people that fe…

Post by soperj » Fri, May 29, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

mothballed wrote: post #87

Lerc wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are governments at many levels. I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management. Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters. If a place had a sewer it probably had a government. Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doin…

Not sure you need any of that. My entire 'city' is private property including the streets. There is absolutely no one to manage them, no HOA, absolutely nothing. If you can't drive on them you literally have to bust out a tractor and fix it. There is no public water or sewer, no public utilities, so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administe…