The Dutch Tulip Mania: Materialism

I think that I understand wanting material items better than almost anyone.  The other week, I spent $108 in the bookstore and I only bought three things!  Anyone who slightly knows me knows that it goes without saying that I have a spending problem.  I also know that I'm not the only one who has this issue.  If you're an uncontrollable spender like me, don't worry, you're not alone!  In fact, people have had this problem for centuries.  I know it's pretty obvious with monarchs of the past buying extravagant things when their people were literally starving (I'm looking at you, Marie Antoinette), but today I'm here to talk about an example of this crazed spending that was shared by all classes of people and happened relatively recently.  This week, I'll be talking about the Dutch Tulip Mania.

The Dutch Tulip Bulb Mania should techincally be referred to as the Tulip Bulb Bubble, but I'll touch on that later.  The Netherlands is famous for its tulips, and this goes back centuries.  It all started when the Sultan of Turkey gave tulip seeds to Ogier de Busbecq, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire.  He distrbuted the seeds to various cities of the HRE, one of which being Amsterdam.  The flowers were very popular among the people of Europe because of the intense color.  These tulips were not easy to grow; it took about 7-12 years for a bulb to grow from a seed.

Due to the intense colors of the tulips, they quickly became very popular.  Their popularity mixed with their rarity caused prices to soar.  Prices reached their peak in 1636-1637.  One tulip bulb went for about 2,500 florins.  To put that in perspective, with 2,500 florins, one could buy four lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, one complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup.  In today's money, that's about $238,273.  Pretty crazy stuff.

However, in February 1637, prices sharply dropped because of buyers refusing to show up at a bulb auction (probably because the auction was held in Haarlem, the site of a bubonic plague outbreak). This enormous price increase and sharp decrease is called a "bubble", and the bubble "burst" when the prices fell.  As they say, the rest is history.

The Dutch Tulip Mania, or simply tulipmania, is a great example of people's materialism.  The bulb became so popular that people were willing to spend up to ten times the amount of an average guilder's annual income for a flower.  This ridiculous spending hasn't gone away, as people continue to spend exorbitant amounts of money on materialistic things, such as $65 on a Penn State pullover when there's one on the sale rack for $15.  So the next time your mom yells at you for buying something she deems unnecessary, remind her that people once spent today's equivalent of almost half a million dollars on a flower.