THE MARKET, THE RECESSION AND A LITTLE DOUBLETALK ABOUT TULIPS
By Robin Ford Wallace
Today we will talk about tulips.
Actually, today we will talk about the economy. The fiscal situation is grave. World depression looms.
Nope. Tulips.
We insist. In these troubled times, it would be an obscene waste of such access to the public ear as we are fortunate enough to retain to froth on about horticulture while soup lines –
Tulips! Tulips! Tulips!
Hmm. We seem to be of two minds. Unfortunate, but perhaps our little problem may in any case elucidate to the reader our rationale for referring to ourself in the pleural.
Suppose, then, that we talk about the economy within the subtext of floriculture, and make everybody happy.
Tulips, though we think of them in connection with Holland, are not native there. Introduced from the Ottoman Empire in the 1500s, though, they took the place by storm, immediately becoming coveted status symbols to the flower-mad Dutch.
By the early 1600s, the most highly prized tulips – those in which a mosaic virus had caused colors to variegate and stripe – were in such hot demand that, according to records of the time, one bulb could be traded for 1000 pounds of cheese, a dozen fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine or 12 acres of land. There was money in tulips, and speculators moved hungrily in.
Tulips bloomed in April, and the bulbs could only be dug up and sold from June to September. So for the rest of the year, traders signed contracts for tulip futures. Contracts were then bought up en masse and traded as a larger commodity, a process called bundling.
Holland was by now exporting tulips, and prices soared until a bulb might fetch 16 times the annual wages of a skilled worker. Everybody from rich merchants to kitchen maids began investing. It was the original speculative bubble.
And, in February 1637, it burst. There came a point at which somebody finally said, “A dozen sheep for that? Hello? It’s, like, a flower. How many hogsheads of wine have you been drinking?”
So the market collapsed, fortunes were lost, and ruined businessmen jumped to their deaths (from windmills, we presume, skyscrapers being rare at the time). When, that spring, a professor saw a tulip blooming during his daily constitutional, he beat it to a pulp with his walking stick.
Or so the story goes. Some economists believe it, and use tulipmania as a paradigm for modern conditions. Others say it’s propaganda, that markets fluctuate but correct themselves with godlike wisdom. And some blame the Dutch government, which legislated changes to tulip contracts when things started to look really scary.
But inevitably, it reminds us of our current economic downturn, in which some blame the government for not regulating the market while others blame it for regulating too much. Also blamed are unscrupulous businessmen, greedy labor unions, Republicans, Democrats, the rich, and even the poor, on the grounds that they started the whole thing by buying homes they could not pay for. That, by the way, is our favorite argument, not because it’s true but because it makes us feel included.
As for what really caused the crash, who knows? At Bob’s Little Acre, we do not dole out wisdom about the stock market, mostly because we do not, technically, know what it is. From the name, we imagine it as a place inhabited by cows, oxen and possibly ducks, because when we listen to the financial news it always sounds like, “The Dow-Jones Industrial quack quack quack.”
But unschooled as we are, even we notice the contradictions. A year ago we read pious little editorials about the evils of overconsumption. The whole problem, we were told, was that Americans spent money we didn’t have on things we didn’t need.
Now we are told that the recession happened because we didn’t consume enough. The only way to save ourselves, we read, is to start shopping again, or remodel the upstairs bathroom.
How? For most of us, going shopping would mean losing our place in the breadline, and we don’t actually have an upstairs bathroom, having resided in a refrigerator box since we lost our job. Which was shipped overseas by a company that considered American workers too expensive, and subsequently went belly-up because unemployed Americans could no longer afford its products.
Such counsel makes us glad to be a gardener. Gardeners, more than other Americans, know that most advice we are given, whether by magazines, extension agents or our neighbor Jim, is contradictory, insane and an utter lie.
Yes, though we gardeners are in the same grim economic boat as everybody else – we grow our own potatoes but still need somewhere to buy our beer – from long years of wallowing in the mud we are possibly a bit closer to the ground.
And what we say is, if it was all a house of cards, why rebuild it? Our system may not have been built on tulips, but if it was built on bling and designer coffee what’s the difference?
Every December we listen to sanctimonious lectures on the true meaning of Christmas from the same people who then stampede the malls. Maybe it’s time for a new model, where less really is more, where people would never dream of building a house with more bathrooms than residents to pee in them, where we trade our hogsheads of wine for neither tulip bulbs nor Rolexes but cheerfully swill them on the lawn while we watch our gardens grow..
Now we must leave because we really do have tulips to plant. Keeping up with the Joneses is anathema to our cozy little utopia, of course; but if our flowers are not prettier than the neighbors’ come spring we will shrivel up like salted slugs.
Does that sound odd? Well, if we have gathered nothing else from the great economic minds of our nation, we have, anyway, learned to talk out of both sides of our mouth.
END
Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.
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