Comment by graeme
2 hours ago
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://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
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".
The Hunt Brothers (re)learned this with silver in the 70's. (80's?)
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.
By that definition every pyramid scheme is rational (of course only until you run out of greater fools).
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.
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.)
1 reply →
Are you asking because you think the LSAT is at odds with the article's description of the mania? Because it is not.
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.
> 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?
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.
That's how pyramid schemes work. Everyone "rationally" thinks they can find a downline, but most of them are wrong.
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.
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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.