Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The book remains in print, and writers continue to discuss its influence, particularly the section on financial bubbles. (See Goldsmith and Lewis, below.)

• Financier Bernard Baruch credited the lessons he learned from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds with his decision to sell all of his stock ahead of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.[9]
• Kurt Vonnegut's seminal novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, references the book.
• The book was the initial inspiration for Richard Condie's National Film Board of Canada animated short film John Law and the Mississippi Bubble (1978).[10]
• Forbes magazine compared Mackay's descriptions of financial bubbles to the Chinese stock bubble of 2007, claiming that the "emotional feedback loop" that drove the Chinese market was very similar to what Mackay described.[11]
• Neil Gaiman borrows from the title in an issue of his popular comic series, The Sandman, in a story featuring a writer whose novel is titled "... And the Madness of Crowds".[12]
• Author and executive coach Marshall Goldsmith discussed the book in depth in BusinessWeek, drawing extensive parallels between the financial bubbles Mackay wrote about and financial bubbles today.[13] Other writers also frequently point to the book to explain recent financial bubbles.[14][15][16]
• Financial writer Michael Lewis includes the financial mania chapters in his book The Real Price of Everything: Rediscovering the Six Classics of Economics as one of the six great works of economics, along with writings by Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes.[3]
• Author and journalist Will Self writes a column for New Statesman, "Madness of Crowds", which Self says takes its title from Mackay's book.[17]
• James Surowiecki, in The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), takes a different view of crowd behavior, saying that under certain circumstances, crowds or groups may have better information and make better decisions than even the best-informed individual.[18]

• "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
• "Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome."
• "How flattering to the pride of man to think that the stars on their courses watch over him, and typify, by their movements and aspects, the joys or the sorrows that await him! He, less in proportion to the universe than the all-but invisible insects that feed in myriads on a summer's leaf are to this great globe itself, fondly imagines that eternal worlds were chiefly created to prognosticate his fate."
• "We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them."
• "We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
• "The obnoxious hat was often snatched from his head and thrown into the gutter by some practical joker, and then raised, covered with mud, upon the end of a stick, for the admiration of the spectators, who held their sides with laughter, and exclaimed, in the pauses of their mirth, 'Oh, what a shocking bad hat!' 'What a shocking bad hat!'"

• Crowd psychology
• Economic bubble
• Groupthink
• Irrational exuberance
• Moral panic
• Pseudodoxia Epidemica

Notes

Bibliography

• Dash, Mike (1999). Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 978-0-609-60439-7. OCLC 41967050.
• Garber, Peter M. (2000). Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-57153-1. OCLC 43552719.
• Goldgar, Anne (2007). Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-30125-9. OCLC 76897793.
• MacKay, Charles (1980). Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (with a foreword by Andrew Tobias, 1841). New York: Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-54123-4. OCLC 5750576.
• Phillips, Tim (2009). Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds: A Modern-day Interpretation of a Finance Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas. ISBN 978-1-905-94091-2.

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The book is in the public domain and is available online from a number of sources:

• Mackay, Charles. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Audio Book read by LibriVox volunteers ed.). Librivox.
• Works by Charles Mackay at Project Gutenberg
• Mackay, Charles (1869). Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. 1. London: George Routledge and Sons – via The Internet Archive.
• Mackay, Charles (1869). Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. 2. London: George Routledge and Sons – via The Internet Archive.