Perhaps because I'm stupid, I didn't realize until just now that it was an allegory for the dot-com era. Oh, well.

Ha. We know just how unstupid you are, so I think that perhaps you are just teasing us, eh?

I had read about tulipomania, the phenomenon, but never the book. I'll have to read it. Is tulipomania an allegory, or is it an analogy? It is analagous, but does that make it an analogy? Seriously, I was trying to think of a better term for a phenomenon that foreshadows a later one that is analogous. Anyone?

I don't think that any of the parallels that Phillips points out are new discoveries, but he did a better job of pulling the various threads together, IMO. I hadn't really though of the parallels between speculatively overbuilt railroads in the late 1800s and overbuilt telecom/fiber a century later, but now I do.