Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

History is filled with surprises no one could have seen coming. But it’s also filled with so much timeless wisdom.

You can play this game all day. Every big story could have turned out differently if a few little puffs of nothingness went the other direction.

An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but we have no idea where it began.

Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation of their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.

One is highlighting this book’s premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events. Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.

Every event creates its own offspring, which impact the world in their own special ways. It makes prediction exceedingly hard.