OP should too, actually, since his comment that
> The price of tulip bulbs has yet to recover from its 1637 peak.
betrays several fundamental misunderstandings of the tulip market at the time. Of course the top tulip bulbs depreciated. That is like saying 'a patent has never recovered its peak value' or 'Windows 3.1 never recovered its March 1992 peak'.
It also notes that while flowers in general averaged 40% annual price depreciation at the time, tulips averaged a more impressive 99.999% annual depreciation.
^ From the same wiki page ^ No idea with the picture you reference where it's from.
The point about economic theory is the market needs to be fluid. It says nothing about crazy people in a small private market(obvious I guess)
The "Tulip" craze seems to me to just be the normal fundamental dogma that you get when people don't fully understand systems. People distorting instances that are not linked to push their views. To me the interesting thing is people 400 years ago also feared financial systems.
The wiki page says that there was very little financial damage from the tulip crash. It also says that "There is no dispute that prices for tulip bulb contracts rose and then fell in 1636–37". I responded to the claim that high tulip prices were a myth. The wiki page cited does not support that idea to any degree. And the portion you cite, in particular, also does not support that idea. It says there was little economic damage from the crash, which I acknowledged, but barely mentioned, because it was irrelevant to my point.
The picture, as wikimedia notes, is from the tulip book of P. Cos, which you could read about here: http://www.oldtulips.org/index.php?section=broken&content=ea...
I don't think you understood my point: these were scarce, expiring, novel luxuries. High initial prices often followed by vast depreciation is normal, and we see it all the time in the most comparable market, fashion and art, where artists who once commanded stratospheric prices tumble into obscurity and their works get junked. Pointing out the claimed performance (and remember the extenuating factors here like a lot of the sources being polemical lies) betrays a lack of appreciation for the volatility and time factor involved.
The tulipomania page does not support the idea that high tulip prices didn't happen. Those tulip catalogs were not the polemical pamphlets (admittedly, it doesn't appear to be clear who put the prices in). The only thing my comment mentions that came from a propaganda pamphlet is the price of cheese, but I figure there's no real reason to doubt them on that. A law really was passed for the relief of people who had bought tulip futures. It seems to have been effective, but none of that means prices weren't high; it means tulip prices didn't have a major effect on the Dutch economy.
