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-...
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.
>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.
Ha this is a brilliant take, and worthy of a follow up.
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"?
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.
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 doing a job like making sure the road signs are repainted every few years.
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 so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administer it. No building inspection, no code inspections. No policeman and no fire; you defend your own life and property rather than some crazed man "protecting and serving" the fuck out of you. Taxes are ~$0. Absolutely glorious. I'd be happy if everywhere was like that.
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.
That's some similarities to the Salem Witch Trials. They were largely about going after whoever had a vendetta and pull with the courts and the bewitchery was the plausible mechanism under which that happens. The 'mania' was largely a veneer under which hid raw projection of judicial-political power to rid political and personal undesirables.
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
Really interesting article, thanks!