Feb. 13: Some things never change, contends Morgan Housel’s Same As Ever

February 13, 2025

“History never repeats itself; man always does.”

This quote from Voltaire kicks off Morgan Housel’s thought-provoking and well-researched look at how our past behaviour and actions, as a society, can help us try and prepare for what’s ahead.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the book tells us, is often asked “what’s going to change in the next 10 years,” but rarely is asked “what’s not going to change in the next 10 years…. And I submit to you, that the second question is actually the more important of the two.”

“Things that never change,” explains Houssel, “are important because you can put so much confidence in knowing how they shape the future… the same philosophy works in almost all areas of life.”

And while we are pretty good at predicting the future, it’s surprises that throw us, he continues.

No one predicted The Great Depression, he explains. Why?

“Either everyone in the past was blinded by delusion,” he posits, meaning they didn’t want to see the crash coming, or “everyone in the present is fooled by hindsight.”

“The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events are always what you don’t see coming,” he explains.

Another category Housel talks about is overall happiness.

A problem that works against us is the tendency to “compare yourself to your peers,” he writes. We want the same things that the super-rich purport to have, at least according to social media.

“You see the cars the other people drive, the homes they live in, the expensive schools they go to… The ability to say `I want that, why don’t I have that? Why does he get it but I don’t,’ is so much greater than it was just a few generations ago,” he explains.

Indeed, he points out, in the 1950s people earned less, but were okay with living in smaller homes, not having healthcare, wearing hand-me-downs and camping instead of staying in hotels because everyone else was in the same boat, doing the same things.

“Economic growth accrued straight to happiness. People weren’t just better off, they felt better off,” he explains of the 1950s.

In a later chapter, he stresses the importance of “the story,” versus the numbers.

He notes that Jeff Bezos once said “the thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

It’s not easy to measure things like “feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which regulate what we’re capable of,” he explains.

As an example of data versus “the story,” he quotes investor Jim Grant:

“To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defence of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.”

“Every investment price,” writes Housel, “every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.”

Near the end of the book, he makes three interesting points about navigating the future:

• “When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behaviour, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails.”
• “Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.”
• “A good question to ask is `which of my current views would change if my incentives were different.’”

A final bit of advice, in the chapter “Wounds Heal, Scars Last,” is that “people tend to have short memories. Most of the time they can forget about bad experiences and fail to heed lessons previously learned. But hard-core stress leaves a scar.”

This is a book that makes you think. There’s a lot of great ideas and stories in this book that a short review can’t fully explore – it’s definitely worth adding to your home library.

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Morgan Housel, Same As Ever

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