Charles MacKaye and the Madness of Crowds

I got quite depressed about economists and their attitudes towards evidence. Charles MacKaye is the basis for all of the modern accounts of this. He was basing himself on an earlier book which was also intended to be entertaining. And so what I think is interesting about this is that relatively unmediated, the propaganda works of the 1630s move into our contemporary discourse through this series of authors. With nobody bothering to go and check that any of it was true. What I thought was interesting was that Dutch historians also didn't really want to work on this. There's still work that could be done.