Thank you for clarifying. I'm assuming (without endorsing) the "capitalist realism" and "rational self-interest" Overton Window of the industrialized West.
I suppose what I'm pushing back against, is the conventional story that tulip bubbles are purely a sucker's game: a belief that "a fool and their money are soon parted" (and the follow-on belief that they deserve to!). There are indeed low-information investors, quasi-gambling-addictions, true believers, etc; but I think we underestimate the game-theoretic trap of zero-sum speculative bubbles, if we merely scoff at the "suckers" buying into beanie babies, or NFT jpegs, or whatever the next thing ends up being.
The thing is that in practice the vast majority ends up down, always, and I mean always. Maybe not completely rekd (people do have some sense of danger) but surely down. This is one of the (valid) arguments used by indexers, the vast majority of individual trading portfolios end up with negative returns. Also corroborated by many stories from successful traders, they usually blew up a few accounts before they figured out something that actually has an edge.
OTOH if you're a young zoomer it really doesn't matter if you blow up your (larger) lunch money.
I suppose what I'm pushing back against, is the conventional story that tulip bubbles are purely a sucker's game: a belief that "a fool and their money are soon parted" (and the follow-on belief that they deserve to!). There are indeed low-information investors, quasi-gambling-addictions, true believers, etc; but I think we underestimate the game-theoretic trap of zero-sum speculative bubbles, if we merely scoff at the "suckers" buying into beanie babies, or NFT jpegs, or whatever the next thing ends up being.