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"A Satire of Tulip Mania" by Jan Brueghel the Younger, ca. 1640

(see below for description of the image from the Frans Hal Museum, in Haarlem, The Netherlands)

Whether it has been tulips or real estate, humankind has a repetitive history of buying something when the price was rising only to experience sudden and catastrophic falling values.  University professor Dr. D.J.C. Smant, of the Erasmus University School of Economics in Rotterdam, explains bubbles.

"One monkey points to flowering tulips while another brandishes a tulip and a moneybag. This is how artist Jan Brueghel indicates that this painting is about the tulip trade. A sale is concluded by hand-clapping. Bulbs are weighed, money is counted, a lavish business dinner is savoured. The monkey on the left has a list of names of expensive tulips. The sword at his side is a status symbol. Farther back, a monkey sits like a nobleman astride a horse. Another in the mid-foreground is drawing up a bill of sale. The owl on his shoulder symbolises folly. Brueghel is ridiculing tulip mania by depicting the speculators as brainless monkeys. The painting also shows what happened when the tulip trade crashed: a monkey on the right urinates on the - now worthless - tulips. Behind him a speculator who has run up debts is being brought before the magistrate. A monkey sits weeping in the dock and in the centre at the back a disappointed buyer is wielding his fists. At the back to the right a speculator is even being carried to his grave." 

from http://vangoghschair.blogspot.com/2008/10/tulip-mania.html (4/30/09)

12 October 2009

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2009 to

Elinor Ostrom
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA,  "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons"

and

Oliver E. Williamson University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA,  "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"

Elinor Ostrom has demonstrated how common property can be successfully managed by user associations. Oliver Williamson has developed a theory where business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution. Over the last three decades these seminal contributions have advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.