Didn't the tulip mania last for forty years?Tulips first arrived in western Europe about 1559. They were first an exotic curiosity, then a popular hobby for the wealthy, and by 1634, when the "mania" started according to Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions, every well-to-do person had a tulip garden. You could therefore make a case that the enthusiasm for tulips was decades in the making---even if it was just the last three years that got really crazy. But it's semantics really. Probably every period of irrational exuberance has to be preceded by a long period of rational exuberance. The trick is knowing when you've moved from one to the other. I imagine future bull/bear discussions will go something like this: A: This whole frobnitz craze is unbelievable. It's just like the great Internet Mania of 1998-2000! B: Thank you so much for your original contribution. If just one more person compares frobnitzes to "tulips" or "Internets" I will puke. Anyway, the twentieth-century tech mania did not last just three years, it started in 1991 and lasted ten years. C: I read that electronic computers were developed and the structure of DNA was discovered in the 1950s. So really the tech craze lasted about five decades. B: Anyway, there is no comparison. Tulips are nice to look at, but what good are they really? Internets, you can waste time sending messages and stuff over them, big whoop. Neither of them represented a real revolution as the frobnitz does. |