Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

Modern life in general is about as safe as it’s ever been. And effectively all the improvement over the last century has come from a decline in infectious disease. In 1900 roughly eight hundred per one hundred thousand Americans died each year from infectious disease. By 2014 that was forty-six per one hundred thousand—a 94 percent decline.

You can’t triple the size of a human and expect triple the performance—the mechanics don’t work like that. Huge animals tend to have short, squatty legs (rhinos), or extremely long legs relative to their torso (giraffes). Wadlow grew too large given the structure of the human body. There are limits to scaling. Writing before Wadlow’s time, biologist J. B. S. Haldane once showed how many things this scaling issue applies to. A flea can jump two feet in the air, an athletic man about four. But if a flea were as large as a man, it would not be able to jump thousands of feet—it doesn’t scale like that. Air resistance would be far greater for the giant flea, and the amount of energy needed to jump a given height is proportional to weight. If a flea were a thousand times its normal size, its hop might increase from two feet to perhaps six, Haldane assumed.

A lot of progress and good news concerns things that didn’t happen, whereas virtually all bad news is about what did occur. Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. That’s hard for people to contextualize or even imagine, let alone measure. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from.

It is so easy to discount how much progress is achievable. If I were to say, “What are the odds the average American will be twice as rich fifty years from now?” it sounds preposterous. The odds seem very low. Twice as rich as they are today? Doubling what we already have? It seems too ambitious. But then if I said, “What are the odds we can achieve 1.4 percent average annual growth for the next fifty years?” I almost sound like a pessimist. One percent? That’s it? But those numbers, of course, are the same.

When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behavior, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails. Everything from wars to recessions to frauds to business failures to market bubbles happen more often than people think because the moral boundaries of what people are willing to do can be extended with certain incentives. That goes both ways. It’s easy to underestimate how much good people can do, how talented they can become, and what they can accomplish when they operate in a world where their incentives are aligned toward progress. Extremes are the norm. Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate. Incentives can keep crazy, unsustainable trends going longer than seems reasonable because there are social and financial reasons preventing people from accepting reality for as long as they can. A good question to ask is, “Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different?” If you answer “none,” you are likely not only persuaded but blinded by your incentives.

Going to the moon is the coolest thing humans have ever done. You’d think it would be an overwhelming experience. But as the spacecraft hovered over the moon, Michael Collins turned to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and said: It’s amazing how quickly you adapt. It doesn’t seem weird at all to me to look out there and see the moon going by, you know? Three months later, after Al Bean walked on the moon during Apollo 12, he turned to astronaut Pete Conrad and said, “It’s kind of like the song: Is that all there is?” Conrad was relieved, because he secretly felt the same, describing his moonwalk as spectacular but not momentous. Expectations also shift and goalposts move faster than you can imagine. Collins once said of Aldrin: “I think he resents not being first on the moon more than he appreciates being second.”

A trick to learning a complicated topic is realizing how many complex details are cousins of something simple. 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. This is so vital. In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills. Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill. Or they learn a new skill: how to dazzle with nonsense. Stephen King explains in his book On Writing: This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. I figured the shorter the book, the less bullshit. Poetry.

A decade ago I made a goal to read more history and fewer forecasts. It was one of the most enlightening changes of my life. And the irony is that the more history I read, the more comfortable I became with the future. When you focus on what never changes, you stop trying to predict uncertain events and spend more time understanding timeless behavior. Hopefully this book nudged you down that path. I try not to give advice to people I don’t know, because everyone’s different and universal guidance is rare. So rather than ending this book with a list of conclusions to implement in your own life, I’ll leave you with a list of questions, all related to the chapters you just read, to ask yourself. Who has the right answers but I ignore because they’re not articulate? Which of my current views would I disagree with if I were born in a different country or generation? 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? What do I think is true but is actually just good marketing? What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive about how something works? What looks unsustainable but is actually a new trend we haven’t accepted yet? Who do I think is smart but is actually full of it? Am I prepared to handle risks I can’t even envision? Which of my current views would change if my incentives were different? What are we ignorin...