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

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-...

Came in to Ctrl-F for "Bitcoin" - 9 matches so far.

1 gram of legal marijuana in Colorado is $1.25. In third world countries it's a few cents outdoors. Partially legal (no import/export between states and countries) and illegal drugs bankrupt people because of prohibition inflation.

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

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

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-...

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

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_...