Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Being selections from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackay's work, first published in 1841, chronicles the various fallacies and delusions that have afflicted human thinking during the modern period. Though the scope of the first edition was wide ranging--including alchemy, fortune-telling, haunted houses and other forms of philosophical delusion-the present editions reprints only those portions of the original work that pertain to economic bubbles. Present-day writers on economics, such as Michael Lewis and Andrew Tobias, laud Mackay's three chapters on the Tulipomania, the South Sea Bubble, and on the Mississippi Scheme.