[gwern]

> If I assume that a "skilled craftsman" in the US earns $20 / hour (less than I made as a summer intern at amazon before graduating college), that puts the price of the bulb at at least $400,000. For the price listed in that catalog, you could also have bought 25,000 pounds of cheese. 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.

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.

[thaumasiotes]

I didn't even understand that you had a point of your own; I saw the conversation go "It's stupid that tulips would go that high, and funnily enough it didn't happen." > "citation?" > "look at the wikipedia page for Tulipomania", and then a comment that it's in the nature of tulips to depreciate over time (side note: I get the analogy to patents, but I don't get the analogy to windows 3.1).

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.