Month: April 2009

Everyone has weighed in with opinions on the subject. The comments flow endlessly from book titles and magazine articles. Our predominating materialistic world view limits our discussion of it to fields of money or fame. But as our defining economic structure crumbles before our very eyes, we'd be well advised to try to redefine it.

Hundreds of years before the meteoric rise of Cisco Systems or Qualcomm stock prices, Semper Augustus tulip bulbs were selling for the price of a house in Holland. Tulipmania was in full swing in the 1600s, and it looked much like the dotcom madness of the 1990s. It crashed eventually, of course, but caused little