Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Softcover

Mackay, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0486432238 ISBN 13: 9780486432236

Publisher: Dover Publications, 2003

Synopsis

This classic survey of crowd psychology offers an illuminating and entertaining look at three grand-scale swindles. Originally published in England in 1841, its remarkable tales of human folly reveal that the hysteria of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the junk-bonds frenzy of the 1980s were far from uniquely twentieth-century phenomena.
The first of the financial scandals discussed, "The Mississippi Scheme," concerns a disastrous eighteenth-century plan for the commercial exploitation of the Mississippi valley, where investors were lured by Louisiana's repute as a region of gold and silver mountains. During the same era, thousands of English investors were ruined by "The South-Sea Bubble," a stock exchange based on British trade with the islands of the South Seas and South America. The third episode involves Holland's seventeenth-century "Tulipomania," when people went into debt collecting tulip bulbs — until a sudden depreciation in the bulbs' value rendered them worthless (except as flowers).
Fired by greed and fed by naiveté,  these historic investment strategies gone awry retain an irrefutable relevance for modern times. Extraordinary Popular Delusions is essential and enthralling reading for investors as well as students of history, psychology, and human nature.

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Review:

Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating,and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.

In fact, cases such as Tulipomania in 1624--when Tulip bulbs traded at a higher price than gold--suggest the existence of what I would dub "Mackay's Law of Mass Action:" when it comes to the effect of social behavior on the intelligence of individuals, 1+1 is often less than 2, and sometimes considerably less than 0.

From the Publisher:

10 1.5-hour cassettes

About this edition

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0486432238
• ISBN 13: 9780486432236
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112