The Madness of Crowds (a convenient short version of the book's full title, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds) verges on being a Victorian miscellany. I write "verges on" since it covers a lot of topics, but it gives quite a bit of space to each.
Reading about the stock market crazes of France and England in the 1710s/20s makes me wonder how the Western world has come to rely entirely on such markets for its economy. Times have definitely changed drastically since the eighteenth century and credit is a much stabler thing than it was when trade was nowhere near worldwide nor running through manifold channels.
But to read Charles Mackay assessing the people who fell for the "scheme" of early stock trading as "fools" makes it difficult to see how our world evolved from one so far removed from our own.
Yet, there's still some truth to what Robert Walpole, the one English member of parliament who spoke out against trading on credit alone, had to say against it: Having such a system "would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry."
As big as the stock market is today, I can't help but wonder what those on Wall Street (and Bay Street, for Canadian readers) would be doing with their wits were it not for the draw of potentially immense, relatively easy wealth.
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