STREET DOGS: Stock market investors suffer from delusions of crowds

From Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor

In his introduction to the 1932 edition of Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Bernard Baruch suggests that US speculators in 1929 displayed the attributes of a crowd psychology. He cites the German playwright Schiller’s dictum that “anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable — as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead”...