Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Review

Just to be clear, since reviews sometimes seem to get moved around, this refers to the 2008 Wilder paperback edition. The text is complete, but there is no table of contents or index, and the illustrations are missing. I subsequently found a nicer edition used at a flea market.

One way to approach a work like this is to look for relevance to our own times. MacKay's catalog of human folly certainly lends itself to that approach. The chapter on the Mississipi Bubble? Think Enron, or Bernie Madoff. The Crusades? Well, there's the perpetual mess in the Middle East, but we can think of any war which was supposed to set things right in some remote part of the world. Alchemy and fortune telling? The Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries certainly have not given up on new-age nonsense.

Personally, I prefer to enjoy a work like this on its own terms. MacKay's writing style is still robust and highly readable today. His energy, and enthusiasm for the subject matter are contagious, whether the topic is witch hunts, famous poisoners, or changing styles in men's hair and beards.

Each chapter stands pretty much by itself, leaving the impression that this is a collection of essays which may not have been originally meant as parts of a single book. The prose style seems somewhat formal and scholarly in our time, but it gradually dawns that this is actually popular journalism of its era. The author is trying to inform, but also to entertain.

Some sections are stronger than others. The Mississippi Bubble chapter is certainly one of the most interesting, as we watch speculation in a dubious financial scheme spiral out of control. The chapter on the Crusades is a decent introduction to the subject, stressing the sheer irrationality of what happened. I believe the narrative is still fairly close to how many modern historians see it.

On the other hand, there are times where the author rambles a little. The chapter on alchemy (or "alchymy") turns into a rather tedious and uninstructive catalog of individual alchemists. "Popular Follies of Great Cities" seems like filler material, although it's not uninteresting.

MacKay's outlook is determinedly rational and skeptical, which comes across well when he discusses such subjects as witch hunting mania, or fortune telling. At one point, though, it seems that his skepticism fails him, when he is discussing famous poisoners. He discusses poisoning cases which were decades or centuries in the past, even for him, and seems willing to accept the contemporary accounts as literally true. At one point, while admitting that confessions elicited by torture are generally worthless, he accepts one such confession as being true nevertheless. Well, nobody's perfect.

The title page of the Wilder edition contains one of those annoying modern PC parental warnings, stating that this work reflects the values of a previous age, and that parents might want to discuss its attitudes toward race with their children. Why must we be so hyper-sensitive? If MacKay occasionally uses different language than we would select today, it is nevertheless obvious that he is as tolerant and unprejudiced as can be expected for a man of his time. If we've moved beyond that, it's still no reason to be paranoid about the standards of an earlier time.

It's interesting, though, to realize that when MacKay writes of the customs of the past, in some cases he is discussing things that were still an issue in his own time. When he writes of the irrationality of dueling, he is discussing something that was still going on in 1841, when his book was first published. Dueling had been illegal in civilized Europe for a couple of centuries by then, but was still occurring, as a culture of honor could make it hard for a man to refuse a challenge. The author's proposal for a solution seems distinctly odd to us, but makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the times.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Overview

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a history of popular folly by Charles Mackay. The book chronicles its targets in three parts: "National Delusions," "Peculiar Follies," and "Philosophical Delusions." Learn why intelligent people do amazingly stupid things when caught up in speculative edevorse. The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, beards (influence of politics and religion on), witch-hunts, crusades and duels. Present day writers on economics, such as Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds Specifications

Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, and over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s are peculiarly 20th century aberrations, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits, and has no temporal bounds. These are extraordinarily illuminating,and, unfortunately, entertaining tales of chicanery, greed and naivete. Essential reading for any student of human nature or the transmission of ideas.

In fact, cases such as Tulipomania in 1624--when Tulip bulbs traded at a higher price than gold--suggest the existence of what I would dub "Mackay's Law of Mass Action:" when it comes to the effect of social behavior on the intelligence of individuals, 1+1 is often less than 2, and sometimes considerably less than 0.

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