Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Published in 1841, the first systematic work on the psychology of financial bubbles and collective irrationality. Mackay documents the Dutch tulip mania (1636), the South Sea Bubble (1720), and the Mississippi Scheme (1720), demonstrating that humans repeat the same irrational errors whenever greed and fear seize the masses. Makes 21st-century headlines feel eerily familiar.