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-...

• Hilliard_Ohiooo

  today at 1:51 PM

  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.

  • kaon_2

    today at 2:20 PM

    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 replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?

    • rithdmc

      today at 2:51 PM

      I wonder what the crossover or relationships between the two - Persons of wealth in positions of power and the church - was here at the time.

      In Ireland, for as long as it has existed with its own government, the two have been pretty heavily intertwined.

  • jeroenhd

    today at 2:58 PM

    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 feels a lot like how early American voting worked (but divided even less evenly).

    The closest thing to an involved government wasn't really in favour of trading in immaterial goods at all. Something close to government intervention did happen in one of the two involved government systems after the bubble popped, but it was effectively unratified and useless (the local equivalent of a supreme court even ruled that the government couldn't interfere with the tulip trade).

    The entire thing was just a club of a few hundred relatively rich people throwing themselves at a bubble. Most people didn't have the means or money to participate.

    The "mania" name is an insult to those who partook as much as it described the trade bubble. It's not related to the modern psychological definition of "mania" that came much later.

  • cucumber3732842

    today at 2:11 PM

    >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.

    The fact that it's marketed as a story about psychology and mania rather than government policy gone awry is arguably itself a story about psychology and mania.

    People have a need to feel like the forces that control them know what they're doing.

    • stingraycharles

      today at 2:15 PM

      Ha this is a brilliant take, and worthy of a follow up.

    • cindyllm

      today at 2:15 PM

      [dead]

• roenxi

  today at 1:50 PM

  It is also worth pointing out how patchy the price data seems to be. Looking at Wikipedia [0] it seems like there isn't much actual evidence and the exciting part of the bubble was 6 months.

  I expect the people involved cared a lot, but it looks like more of a cool curio than an event that could have had serious fallout. Paying $200k for a tulip looks quite tame compared to Blue Poles.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

• namdnay

  today at 1:15 PM

  Really interesting article, thanks!

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

• brap

  today at 1:45 PM

  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.

  • hodder

    today at 2:00 PM

    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.

  • jbverschoor

    today at 2:49 PM

    No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....

  • vmg12

    today at 2:16 PM

    Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.

    • hsartoris

      today at 2:36 PM

      > Using your reasoning

      Clearly not, the point being made was that you owned a thing, e.g. a Pokemon card. To own an NFT is to, bafflingly, claim to hold a token of ownership of some asset represented by the NFT - where that representation is indicated by the NFT immutably containing, typically, a thoroughly mutable Google Drive link to a picture. The whole thing was always farcical.

      Again, at least you actually own the Pokemon card at the end of the day.

    • im3w1l

      today at 2:20 PM

      The big issue with NFT's is that can't use them to flex on people as easily.

      • pants2

        today at 2:39 PM

        I think that was a big part of it, if you owned an expensive NFT and set it as your profile picture it gave you some cred with certain circles online.

  • today at 2:00 PM

  • root-parent

    today at 1:59 PM

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

    No different from bitcoin...

  • jMyles

    today at 2:16 PM

    I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.

    I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.

    It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.

    • JCTheDenthog

      today at 2:56 PM

      >I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid.

      The problem with the NFTs is that you don't actually own the art they represent and have zero copyright claim to them. In the absolute very best of cases, if you squint hard enough, you could see them as roughly equivalent to the signature of the original creator of the work of art and you're effectively buying a signed digital print of the work. In the worst and more common cases, you're buying nothing at all except a hash on a blockchain.

I 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-...

• xnorswap

  today at 12:52 PM

  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".

  • today at 1:30 PM

  • JKCalhoun

    today at 1:27 PM

    The Hunt Brothers (re)learned this with silver in the 70's. (80's?)

    • altruios

      today at 3:01 PM

      what happened with the silver rule 7 is different from the tulip craze.

      Hunt brothers buy a bunch of silver, lots on margin (bank borrowed), government saw what was happening and literally changed the rules of the market to force them to mass liquidate when they couldn't meet a margin call (all of the sudden). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

• danbruc

  today at 1:42 PM

  According to Copilot you can get one or two offspring per year from a tulip. So if you spent the price of a really nice house on one of those, it will take you quite some time to multiply the price down into reasonable territory. And even if you stay in unreasonable price territory, an average home, it is one thing to find a buyer for one tulip at that price, it is a very different thing to find a bunch of them. And you are still looking at three, four, five years of tulip growing to get the price down to a tenth of what you paid.

• jansan

  today at 12:47 PM

  By that definition every pyramid scheme is rational (of course only until you run out of greater fools).

  • toenail

    today at 1:10 PM

    What's the pyramid scheme here? The Netherlands are the top producers of tulips today, seems like a sustainable business. A temporary inefficiency in markets does not make a pyramid scheme.

    • gbear605

      today at 1:15 PM

      Pyramid schemes are defined by the price and structure. A business that sells knives is a fine business. A business that sells overpriced knives by promising that you can then find someone else to sell more knives for you at an even higher price is a pyramid scheme.

      Selling tulips is a fine business. Selling tulips at an insanely high price by promising that the market for tulips will keep on expanding and increasing the price of tulips is a pyramid scheme. (Well, maybe not quite a pyramid scheme, the structure isn't right. But it certainly wasn't a sustainable business model.)

      • bluecheese452

        today at 1:31 PM

        Cutco?

• shiandow

  today at 12:39 PM

  Are you asking because you think the LSAT is at odds with the article's description of the mania? Because it is not.

  • somenameforme

    today at 12:52 PM

    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.

    • bri3k

      today at 1:25 PM

      It is called the Greater Fool theory. I know that it is a foolish purchase, it true value is less than what I paid for. But there is a greater fool out there that will pay more.

    • ses1984

      today at 1:59 PM

      > 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?

    • tardedmeme

      today at 12:54 PM

      That's how pyramid schemes work. Everyone "rationally" thinks they can find a downline, but most of them are wrong.

    • watwut

      today at 1:10 PM

      People in the bubble typically know they are in the bubble. They do not know when to get out. The "even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses" is the thing people are wrong about - once bubble is popping, only fastest few can react fast enough.

      • somenameforme

        today at 1:46 PM

        Is this true though? Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - that bubble has obviously long since popped, but those ape NFTs still trade for ~$20k with daily volume in the hundreds of thousands, and a lot of people made a lot of money off it all, some probably still are. At their peak they sold for millions of dollars, but that's on the extreme fringe end. Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.

        And we're speaking of modern times where there is this one grand unified global marketplace - the internet, that is most conducive to an inescapably rapid boom-bust. In tulip times there would have been a vast number of relatively decentralized marketplaces with varying supply and demand levels, for a good amount of time after the bubble popped.

        • watwut

          today at 2:45 PM

          That is what I took from economy history and from what economists wrote on the topic. That past bubbles we recognized as bubbles were known to contemporaries. They wrote articles about the situation being a bubble, they knew.

          > Take NFTs for again the latest contemporary example - Most traders literally can't afford the heights of bubbles, or anywhere near them, which largely limits the breadth of massive losses.

          I dont know whether you could have use your NFT "investment" as a collateral for mortgage or it shown up in company sheet etc. Honestly, I don't know who were traders of NFT in the first place. I think that all in all, NFT were kind of a fringe thing for super rich basically gamblers.

          What you do actually get with crypto or stocks or in retail futures trading are people who have put all their money into that stuff. Or even took debt to put their money in. So, they are loosing all of that. Or, they invested into funds that buy that stuff - you invest whatever you have, those money join other peoples money and suddenly fund can buy it. And the last point is important, because some of those funds are things like pension funds who invest into certain stuff automatically.

• vasco

  today at 12:50 PM

  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.

You know, we also have the tulips of our time...

• walthamstow

  today at 1:18 PM

  We've had loads of tulips this century, from beanie babies to NFTs

• dude250711

  today at 1:05 PM

  Once OpenAI/Anthropic IPO, until then it's not a perfect analogy.

  • wiseowise

    today at 1:41 PM

    I'm all for shitting on hyperscalers, but let's not compare LLMs to tulips/NFTs.

    • root-parent

      today at 2:07 PM

      This time is different because we have the earnings...while completely ignoring the return on capital...is nothing more than a CNBC meme...

    • conartist6

      today at 1:50 PM

      Why not? After all tulips are quite pleasant when the message about them isn't "HODL." You could hardly claim they have no value, only that their perceived value had come to be dominated by groupthink.

      Sure sounds like LLMs to me. A fine technology. It exists. Like tulips, it will exist for quite a while to come. So maybe people could stop "betting on it" like it's a polymarket prediction on the second coming of Christ, eh? LLMs, like Christ and Tulips, do not require you to bet on them.

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

• today at 2:02 PM

• root-parent

  today at 2:01 PM

  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.

Perhaps beanie babies is an example that we actually know about.

• TheOtherHobbes

  today at 2:08 PM

  I wonder if there are more recent examples?

  • dalben

    today at 2:09 PM

    NFTs

    • renegade-otter

      today at 2:18 PM

      I think NFTs were this niche thing only crypto people were dealing. It was not a wide cultural phenomenon. I bet the majority of the population don't know what it is.

      • some_random

        today at 3:12 PM

        I'm not sure if I'd call it culture wide, but a significant number of non-tech people in my life were not just aware of it but actively considering "investing".

Bitcoin circa 2018-2019.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1574985600&dateRange=custom&...

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_...

• pedrocr

  today at 2:21 PM

  In the AMA you link they say the tulip mania was probably a bubble just not a major one that impacted the economy meaningfully.

I better not show my beautiful, flower-loving wife this article. We already have enough flowers (and I would like to be able to keep our home)

> when a single flower was worth more than a house

Yeah but housing prices weren't as crazy as they are now.

Subject is very interesting but this article does a poor job exploring it

It's funny to me as a Dutch citizen that all of our cultural heritage comes from abroad. Even cheese was apparently invented on the Asian steppes.

For a wider context, if needed: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...>

• jpmattia

  today at 1:22 PM

  Manias, Panics, and Crashes by Charles Kindleberger is a more modern book, which I'd recommend as well.

ah there's a good term

so "AI" mania ("AI" derangement syndrome?)

when ram and storage starts to cost as much as rent or a car eventually

now we just wait for the bubble collapse and lots of cheap hardware even if slightly used

• PunchyHamster

  today at 2:47 PM

  sadly the AI it produces despise the overhype is still way more useful than tulips. I don't think bubble burst would get us to RAM prices pre-boom for a while

Now we have startups that have 0 revenue, 0 product and 0 cash flow now somehow being worth over a billion which is more than mansions.

• andsoitis

  today at 1:44 PM

  > we have startups that have 0 revenue, 0 product and 0 cash flow now somehow being worth over a billion

  What is one such example?

  • rvz

    today at 2:26 PM

    Many such prominent examples such as Thinking Machines, SSI and AMI Labs and many others like them.

    Of course, the only reason for this 'valuation' is because of the founding team but that is just not enough.

    This is still a crystal clear bubble.

We do this now with something even less intrinsically valuable than tulips: BTC.

It all just comes down to supply and demand.

Similar articles in the future. "Bitcoin mania: when a single bitcoin was worth more than a house"

• toenail

  today at 1:11 PM

  Similar articles from the past: "Bitcoin mania: when a single bitcoin was worth more than a pizza"

• gosub100

  today at 1:22 PM

  Bored ape

• irishcoffee

  today at 12:58 PM

  It feels so much worse to me. You could at least hold a tulip bulb, plant it, look at it, smell it, and it was a real thing.

  The closest you can get to that with bitcoin would be what? Print out your keypair? Maybe write it down on fancy stationary using fancy calligraphy? (Never do these things)

  • tempoponet

    today at 2:25 PM

    - You can send any amount of money to anyone in the world very quickly and cheaply, and nobody can stop you.

    - No government can dilute it or limit its supply.

    Stuff like that. Maybe that matters to you, maybe not, but BTC was created because that didn't exist. And even if you don't use it, you're living in a world where financial institutions have to live alongside an alternative that does these things, for whatever that's worth.

  • zulux

    today at 1:01 PM

    Convert it to drugs. With the right combination, you can talk to Mr. Bitcoin.