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Shadow Government #53
Flowers for May
by John A. Jackson
Not long ago a dear friend celebrated his 83nd birthday. We sent him a big bunch of tulips via Proflowers.com. Our hope was to make him blush. We failed.
"If you can't wear it, eat it or fornicate it," he replied, "what good is it?"
But he did say that the flowers were beautiful.
Our friend was also immune to the dot.com boom, but a lot of people were not.
Before the next financial fad, they would do well to read Mike Dash's astonishing new book, Tulipomania, about the classic bubble-and-smash.
Tulips, a Turkish import, were the hot new thing in early 17th century Holland. They were lovely, they were hardy and the more exotic varieties were incomparably rare. (Also, you could roast and eat them, as their first Dutch owner did. But that is another matter.)
At the height of the mania, for a few weeks in 1636 and 1637, you could trade one of the more valuable bulbs for, among other things, two or three Rembrandt paintings, or eight fat pigs and four oxen and 12 sheep. Also, for the same plant, 24 tons of wheat and 48 tons of rye and two tons of butter and a thousand pounds of cheese and a wardrobe, a bed and a ship.
Such a bulb selling for 3,000 guilders was equal in value to 10 years' work by a skilled artisan. Some bulbs were listed for as much as 10,000 guilders.
Then in one week, in February, 1637, the market disappeared. Tulips retained their admirers, and lovely, rare flowers could still command good prices. But the craze died all at once.
Most of the tulip trade was in futures contracts, not in actual plants. When the boom ended, the Dutch cities responded with the greatest sanity: cases involving tulip contracts were simply banned from the courts. Damage, though severe in some cases, was limited.
But similar manias have followed; for hyacinths climaxing in 1737, for instance; for dahlias in France in 1838, and in 1985 in China for the red spider lily. Bulbs of the most coveted spider lilies sold for a reported 200,000 yuan or $50,000, 300 years' earnings for a typical Chinese university graduate.
Of course, flowers are not the only objects of desire.
Of all manias, Dash writes, the modern one that most resembled the tulip craze was the Florida land boom of 1925. Lots in Miami started at $30 an acre and soared to $75,000. Eventually Miami land became more costly than lots on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Then sanity intervened. Property that started at $12 an acre wound up back at $12.
Dash makes no comment about the Internet stock craze of 2000. Perhaps he felt no comment is necessary.
Motorola and RCA led the stock boom of 1929; they were the high tech stocks of those days and they offered real value, if not as much as their stocks cost in September, 1929.
Much of my own faith in the future is invested in various features of the Internet. I can imagine a new mankind freed electronically of the ignorances and parochialisms of the old.
I can see entrepreneurs devote themselves to enterprises that cannot pollute, that add no carbon to the atmosphere, that shed enlightenment and not avarice, that cultivate us even as we use them-as though we were the choicest and tenderest plants in the garden.
Which is what we are.
I'm just not putting much money right now in that marketplace.
John A. Jackson may be reached at TomShadwell@cs.com. ER
Editor’s note: The Shadow Government column titled "Warmer, warmer," which appeared in Easy Reader last month, is one of about 90 essays, cartoons and drawings chosen for inclusion in One Hundred Days, a book of commentary about the Bush Administration's beginnings, from Barque Press in Cambridge, England. Copies may be obtained by sending a check for $15 to Andrea Brady, 309 E. Gravers Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118