|
|
WHAT WE’RE READING |
Tao Tan |
Tao Tan, an associate partner in New York, focuses on crisis response, transformation, and private equity. He is a coauthor on a piece about how McKinsey’s influence model can help leaders change behaviors in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He spends his pandemic-bound weekends cooking (mostly Italian) and reading (mostly history). |
|
|
|
|
I am a history nerd through and through, and one of my casual interests is seeing how similar events in history repeat, or, as some would say, rhyme. I’m currently reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay, a Scottish journalist from the mid-19th century. It’s a tongue-in-cheek (and a bit sensationalistic) takedown of all the manias that swept the world up to that time, including alchemy, fortune telling, witchcraft, and—my personal favorite—financial bubbles. |
MacKay chronicles three bubbles: Mississippi in France (where the word “millionaire” is said to have originated), South Seas in England (where Isaac Newton lost a fortune), and most infamously, tulips in Holland. Some of the stories make you shake your head: a particularly enterprising speculator raised £2,000—the equivalent of about $400,000 today—for “carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is.” (And indeed, no one did find out what it was, as the speculator raised the money in one afternoon and promptly disappeared.) |
Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is likely based on his uncle’s diaries from the London plague of 1665. So many themes sound shockingly familiar, such as the quarantining of entire neighborhoods and not knowing what data to believe. (Doctors’ tallies? What if they contradict churchyard burials?) Of course, there was no end to opportunists peddling quack cures, including one particularly unsavory figure who drew large crowds by promising to “give advice to the poor for nothing”—his advice being to purchase his mysterious concoctions. Defoe also chronicles more mundane matters, like the question of who constitutes a critical vendor (butchers? bakers?) and the diarist’s scramble and annoyance at securing supplies to weather a lockdown. |
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is a fascinating study of crowd psychology and how mass movements greased by fanaticism form across political, religious, and social spectra. It lays out the appeal of such movements in terms of self-sacrifice and unifying actions and how they grow, scale, and—more often than not—fizzle, only to crop up again later on. Published in 1951, the book looks to the horrific experiences of the Second World War but also further back to periods such as the Reformation. |
Ultimately, what are the personalities and motives of people who begin mass movements and join them? Hoffer believes the appeal stems from escapism from the drudgery of everyday life to the promise of a revolutionary future with limitless possibilities. Ultimately, these movements can’t help but disappoint. |
Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman’s Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World is a look back at how the European expansion from the 17th to 20th centuries was aided by companies like the British and Dutch East India Companies, founded as profit-making entities but also endowed with powers akin to sovereign states. These hybrid entities have long served at the forefront of the emerging relationships among nation-states, when the risks of exploration, international trade, and eventually colonization was—at least initially—underwritten by private investors instead of governments. For example, at one point, the British East India Company’s army was twice the size of the actual British Army. Outsourcing Empire offers lessons for our own global economy, as protectionist and nationalist sentiments swirl. |
|
|
— Edited by Barbara Tierney |
|
BACKTALK |
Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
|
![](https://www.mckinsey.com/assets/dotcom/newsletters/images/vi/spacer.gif) |
|
|
Copyright © 2021 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007 |
|
|
|