Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

by Morgan Housel

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

Forecasting events is hard because it’s easy to skip the question “And then what?”

We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.

People gauge their well-being relative to those around them, and luxuries become necessities in a remarkably short period of time when the people around you become better off.

Median hourly wages adjusted for inflation are nearly 50 percent higher today than in 1955.

The homeownership rate was 12 percentage points lower in 1950 than it is today.

Food consumed 29 percent of an average household’s budget in 1950 versus 13 percent today.

Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.

Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.

The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.

The first rule of a happy life is low expectations.

wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need.

You want to feel a gap between what you expected and what actually happened.

people who think about the world in unique ways you like almost certainly also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.

people who are capable of achieving incredible things often take risks that can backfire just as powerfully.

A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.

That something can be likely and not happen, or unlikely and still happen, is one of the world’s most important tricks.

Most people get that certainty is rare, and the best you can do is make decisions in which the odds are in your favor.

people think they want an accurate view of the future, but what they really crave is certainty.

Adjusted for population growth, more Americans lost their jobs during the 1958 recession than did in any single month during the Great Recession of 2008.

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.

the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic.

people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

Some of the most important forces in the world—particularly those regarding people’s personalities and mindsets—are nearly impossible to measure and impossible to predict.

always be the case. Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of.

the reason we have innovation and advancement is because we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from ours.

what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another.

The mere idea of stability causes a smart and rational movement toward bidding asset prices up high enough to cause instability.

“Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history,” writer Kelly Hayes once wrote.

The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.

Carl Jung had a theory called enantiodromia. It’s the idea that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.

What calm planting the seeds of crazy does is important: It makes us fundamentally underestimate the odds of things going wrong, and the consequences of something going wrong.

optimism and pessimism always have to overshoot what seems reasonable, because the only way to discover the limits of what’s possible is to venture a little way past those limits.

most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity.

the biggest changes and the most important innovations don’t happen when everyone is happy and things are going well.

Stress focuses your attention in ways good times can’t. It kills procrastination and indecision, taking what you need to get done and shoving it so close to your face that you have no choice but to pursue

by 1941 the U.S. economy was producing 40 percent more output than it had in 1929, with virtually no increase in the total number of hours worked.

good news takes time but bad news tends to occur instantly.

Progress always takes time, often too much time to even notice it’s happened.

Even when something doesn’t break easily, the thing that could break it is usually simpler than whatever made it.

A lot of progress and good news concerns things that didn’t happen, whereas virtually all bad news is about what did occur.

It is so easy to discount how much progress is achievable.

Most amazing things happen when something tiny and insignificant compounds into something extraordinary.

Big risks are easy to overlook because they’re just a chain reaction of small events, each of which is easy to shrug off.

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.

The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.

There is a balance, he said, between needing unwavering faith that things will get better while accepting the reality of brutal facts, whatever they may be.

you can only be an optimist in the long run if you’re pessimistic enough to survive the short run.