Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

This version of the 1950s lifestyle is true in the sense that the median American family indeed had three kids and a dog named Spot and a breadwinning husband who worked at the factory, on and on. But the idea that the typical family was better off then than now—that they were more prosperous and more secure, by nearly any metric—is easy to debunk. Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 1965 it was $42,000. In 2021 it was $70,784. Life described the 1950s as prosperous in a way that would have seemed unbelievable to someone living in the 1920s. The same is true today—a 1950s family would have found it unfathomable that their grandchildren would earn more than twice as much as they did. And higher income wasn’t due to working more hours, or entirely due to women joining the workforce in greater numbers.

Median hourly wages adjusted for inflation are nearly 50 percent higher today than in 1955. Some of today’s economic worries would have puzzled a 1950s family. The homeownership rate was 12 percentage points lower in 1950 than it is today. An average home was a third smaller than today’s, despite having more occupants. Food consumed 29 percent of an average household’s budget in 1950 versus 13 percent today. Workplace deaths were three times higher than today. That’s the economic era we long for? Yes. And it’s important to understand why.

Actual circumstances don’t make much difference in all these cases. What generates the emotion is the big gap between expectations and reality. When you think of it like that, you realize how powerful expectations are. They can make a celebrity feel miserable and a destitute family feel amazing. It’s astounding. Everyone, everywhere, doing almost any task, is just in pursuit of some space between expectations and reality. But that’s so easy to overlook.

Probability is about nuance and gradation. But in the real world people pay attention to black-and-white results. If you said something will happen and it happens, you were right. If you said it will happen and it doesn’t, you were wrong. That’s how people think, because it requires the least amount of effort. It’s hard to convince others—or yourself—that there could have been an alternative outcome when there’s a real-world outcome sitting in front of you. The core here is that people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty.

Digital news has by and large killed local newspapers and made information global. Eighteen hundred U.S. print media outlets disappeared between 2004 and 2017.

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.

The idea isn’t heavy on math and formulas. It describes a psychological process that basically goes like this: • When an economy is stable, people get optimistic. • When people get optimistic, they go into debt. • When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable. Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing. A lack of recessions actually plants the seeds of the next recession, which is why we can never get rid of them.

President Richard Nixon once observed: The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the South Coast of France, and Newport, and Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose. So while there are those that would totally disagree with this and say “Gee, if I could just be a millionaire! That would be the most wonderful thing.” If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world—they don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.

People weren’t complacent. The late 1920s saw an overvalued stock market, real estate speculation, and poor farm maintenance. That was obvious. It was well-documented. It was discussed. But so what? None of those things are a big deal in isolation. It wasn’t until they happened at the same time, and fed off one another, that they turned into the Great Depression. The stock market falls, the boss loses his savings, he lays people off, those people default on their mortgage, and the bank goes under. When banks fail, people lose their savings. When they lose their savings, they stop spending. When they stop spending, businesses fail. When businesses fail, banks fail. When banks fail, people lose their savings—and so on endlessly. Same thing with COVID-19.

Psychologists Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson have a theory I love called depressive realism. It’s the idea that depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. The opposite of depressive realism is “blissfully unaware.” It’s what many of us suffer from. But we don’t actually suffer from it, because it feels great. And the fact that it feels good is the fuel we need to wake up and keep working even when the world around us can be objectively awful, and pessimism abounds.

Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination.

Nassim Taleb says, “My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.” More than a measure of success, I think it’s a key ingredient. The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.

Jeff Bezos once talked about the realities of loving your job: If you can get your work life to where you enjoy half of it, that is amazing. Very few people ever achieve that. Because the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That’s reality. Everything comes with pieces that you don’t like. You can be a Supreme Court justice and there’s still going to be pieces of your job you don’t like. You can be a university professor and you still have to go to committee meetings. Every job comes with pieces you don’t like. And we need to say: That’s part of it.

There’s a theory in evolutionary biology called Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. It’s the idea that variance equals strength, because the more diverse a population is, the more chances it has to come up with new traits that can be selected for. No one can know what traits will be useful; that’s not how evolution works. But if you create a lot of traits, the useful one—whatever it is—will be in there somewhere.

John Reed wrote in his book Succeeding: When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.

If you say something I didn’t know but can understand, I might think you’re smart. If you say something I can’t understand, I might think you have an ability to think about a topic in ways I can’t, which is a whole different species of admiration. When you understand things I don’t, I have a hard time judging the limits of your knowledge in that field, which makes me more prone to taking your views at face value.

What do I desperately want to be true so much that I think it’s true when it’s clearly not? What is a problem that I think applies only to other countries/industries/careers that will eventually hit me?