[_maelstrom]

It's buried in the wikipedia article, but these stories of tulips being a giant society collapsing bubble "come from propaganda pamphlets published by Dutch Calvinists worried that the tulip-propelled consumerism boom would lead to societal decay."[1]

“There weren’t that many people involved and the economic repercussions were pretty minor,” Goldgar [author of "Tulipmania" and a professor of early modern history at King’s College London] says. “I couldn’t find anybody that went bankrupt. If there had been really a wholesale destruction of the economy as the myth suggests, that would’ve been a much harder thing to face.”[1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...