Myths and assumptions of tulips

One of the best parts of Debt: The First 5,000 Years was pointing out the myth that economies always begin with barter (hint: they never have).

Similarly, whenever a market starts to heat up, we inevitably hear about the tulip bubble in Holland in the 1630’s. Well… turns out those stories are myths as well. Anne Goldgar has written a book, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age which debunks these myths.

She summarizes that story in this post on The Conversation.

I love mythbusting like this, where we find out that truths that are told year after year turn out to be bunk. It’s almost as much fun as discovering that something you thought had been around forever had been invented in your parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime (see Sliced Bread).

But still not as fun as uncovering an assumption that everyone around you is taking for granted.

There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...

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There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...

The buzzword of 2024 is “AI” and like social, mobile, cloud, fintech, and blockchain, every startup is claiming to have it and every big startup fundraising is claiming to expand what can be done with it. Or in short, we’ve been here before. A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle does a very good job explaining how this will play out in 13 steps, and how it already played...