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-...

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

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-...

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

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

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

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_...

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)

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

> when a single flower was worth more than a house

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

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

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.

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

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

It all just comes down to supply and demand.

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.

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