The key ideas

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Morgan Housel, 2023

The world changes beyond recognition, yet people behave the way they did hundreds of years ago. Morgan Housel, author of “The Psychology of Money”, gathers stories about the things that never change: fear, envy, expectations and self-interest. The book will help you guess less about the future and prepare for it better.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of forecasts that never come true. And for anyone who wants to make calmer decisions about money, work and the future.

Risk is what you don't see.

The candy bar that outlasted everything

Late 2009, Omaha. The economy is on its knees, stores are closed, windows are boarded up. Warren Buffett is driving through town with a close friend, who asks how the economy could possibly recover. Buffett answers with a question: what was the best-selling candy bar in 1962? Snickers. And what is the best-selling candy bar today? Snickers again. And that is the end of the conversation.

Morgan Housel, who writes books about money and is a partner at Collaborative Fund, opens his book of twenty-three short chapters with this story. His point is simple: the world changes beyond recognition, but people don't. If you were sent five hundred years into the past or the future, the technology and the language would be foreign to you. But greed, fear, envy and overconfidence would feel familiar from the very first minute.

Housel doesn't know where the stock market will go next year or who will win the next election. What he does know for sure is how frightened and greedy people behave. So instead of asking “what will change?”, he suggests asking “what will stay true in a thousand possible versions of the future?”

Ahead are six rules that always hold. Let's start with the risk that nobody sees.

The biggest danger is the one nobody thought of

In May 1961 the American pilot Victor Prather rode a balloon almost to the edge of space to test a new NASA pressure suit. The suit worked flawlessly. On the way down, once there was enough air again, Prather opened the faceplate of his helmet. He splashed down in the ocean but slipped off the line of the rescue helicopter. The sealed suit would have kept him afloat, but water poured in through the open faceplate, and Prather drowned.

NASA thinks through every detail, and every risk has a plan A, B and C. And still a man was killed by a detail nobody had thought of. The financial planner Carl Richards puts it this way: risk is what's left over when you think you've thought of everything.

Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic have one thing in common, and it is not their scale: almost nobody saw them coming. That is why Housel advises preparing instead of predicting. California prepares for earthquakes this way: no one knows when or where the next one will strike, but houses are built to withstand it. In personal finance, it means keeping savings that feel like a little more than you need, and borrowing a little less than feels affordable.

Read in Livria

About the author

Morgan Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and the author of “The Psychology of Money”. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

All books by this author: Morgan Housel

Terms from the book

  • Compound interest
  • Buffett
  • Richards
  • Pearl Harbor
  • Match.com
  • Minsky
  • Eisenhower
  • Incentive
  • Pavlov
  • Great Depression
  • Omaha: A city in the US state of Nebraska.
  • Collaborative Fund: The investment firm where Morgan Housel is a partner. Many chapters of the book grew out of his blog on its website.
  • Prather: Victor Prather, an American pilot. In 1961 he rode a balloon almost to the edge of space to test a NASA pressure suit, and drowned after splashing down.
  • Kremen: Gary Kremen, an American entrepreneur and the founder of the dating site Match.com.
  • Financial instability hypothesis: Minsky's central idea: long stability makes people optimistic, optimists take on debt, and debt makes the economy unstable.
  • Lehman Brothers: A large American bank that operated for 158 years. It went bankrupt in September 2008.
  • Leningrad: The city where Pavlov had his laboratory and kennels for his dogs.

All terms

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