This is a map of the bursting of the famous South Sea Bubble in the 1720s.
As Frank Jacobs explains,
This Dutch hand-coloured copperplate engraving mocks the flawed thinking behind bubble economics, also known as the Greater Fool Hypothesis: no matter how inflated the price of a given commodity, somewhere out there is an idiot who’ll pay even more for it.
Where’s a good map-maker today when we need them?
