![]() ![]() ![]() Cornelius van Baerle is an affluent tulip-fancier who has successfully cultivated many types of tulips. Naturally, because greedy human beings are involved, the race to be the first one to grow the black tulip compels certain 'tulip-fanciers' to go to any lengths - including incrimination - to win the prize. The Haarlem Horticultural Society devises a contest to award the person who can grow a black tulip a prize of one hundred thousand guilders (which seemed to have been a great deal of money at that time). Alexandre Dumas's The Black Tulip takes us back to an early example of this in seventeenth-century Holland, where the cultivation of tulips of all colors was a pastime of the wealthy. We have come to know of certain black tulips in our own time, including the demand which was created when banks started buying up mortgaged-backed securities and the resulting fall-out. ![]() The black tulip has come to be synonymous with the concept of artificial demand: that anything, if arbitrarily deemed rare or valuable enough, can become so expensive that its real worth is forgotten. ![]()
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