Book Review – Same as Ever
Image: Same as Ever by Len Lantz (CC BY-NC-ND)
Synopsis: Len's Star Rating: 8 out of 10. An enjoyable book that focuses on predictable behaviors and patterns in an unpredictable future.
BY LEN LANTZ, MD / 4.4.2025; No. 129
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a physician, but I’m not your doctor, and this article does not create a doctor-patient relationship. This article is for educational purposes and should not be seen as medical advice. You should consult with your physician before you rely on this information. This post also contains affiliate links. Please click this LINK for the full disclaimer.
Star Rating – 8 out of 10
Rating guide: 1 = horrible, 5 = average and 10 = wow
Author
Morgan Housel
About the author
Morgan Housel is a New York Times bestselling author and former contributor to The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He achieved his BA in Economics from the University of Southern California. Housel is a partner at Collaborative Fund and a board member at Markel. He has a twice-weekly podcast called The Morgan Housel Podcast. MarketWatch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets.
General description
Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever is his second book following his runaway bestseller, The Psychology of Money (with over 7 million copies sold worldwide). In Same as Ever, the author explores the repeating patterns of human behavior. While many aspects of the future cannot be predicted, some aspects can. Morgan Housel takes the reader on a bird’s eye view of humanity as he asserts that people’s reactions to unpredicted life events, from the mundane to crisis-level, are largely predictable. The author describes Same as Ever as “a book of short stories about what never changes in a changing world.” While the 23 chapters follow the theme that we can all learn from our repetitive thinking and behavioral patterns, the book primarily covers financial and personal growth perspectives.
Unique and most important aspects
Same as Ever is an intriguing book that covers insights and details everyone should know, but for some reason, we don’t, or we forget. That the individual chapters in Same as Ever do not follow a pattern is understandable, as the author explains in his introduction that many of the chapters in this book are expansions of previous blog posts.
Despite the book’s lack of structure, Morgan Housel provides insights and unexpected connections between ideas mindfully and brilliantly. His first chapter, “Hanging by a Thread,” sets the stage for the rest of the book, as he shares about a personal tragedy that has influenced him, similar to how our individual experiences influence all of us. The chapter “Wild Numbers,” which makes the point that people are more interested in certainty than accuracy, is one of the best. Here are some ideas from the book that I found interesting:
Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis: stability is destabilizing (an economic application of Carl Jung’s theory, enantiodromia, which Jung borrowed from Heraclitus)
How crisis can lead to inexplicable productivity
The military has been the engine of some of our most important technological innovations
A Stanford study showed walking increases productivity by 60% (M Oppezzo, D Schwartz. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 2014)
How almost 40% of all public companies from 1980 to 2014 essentially went bankrupt
That it was illegal for individuals to own gold coins, gold bullion, and gold certificates in the US starting in the 1930s (starting in 1933 and lasting until 1974)
Readers might wonder how these ideas tie together, because they don’t appear to when viewed closely. Author Morgan Housel shows their connection as he zooms out to the macro level—the collective “we”—of human behavior.
Best quotes
“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.”
“‘After booms come busts’ is about as close to economic law as it gets. Study history, and the calamity that followed the booming 1920s, late 1990s, and early 2000s seems more than obvious. It seems inevitable.”
“So, in personal finance, the right amount of savings is when it feels like it’s a little too much. It should feel excessive; it should make you wince a little. The same goes for how much debt you think you should handle—whatever you think it is, the reality is probably a little less.”
“The first rule of happiness is low expectations.”
“There is no such thing as objective wealth—everything is relative, and mostly relative to those around you.”
“Today’s economy is good at generating three things: wealth, the ability to show off wealth, and great envy for other people’s wealth.”
“A one-hundred-year event doesn’t mean it happens every one hundred years. It means there’s about a 1 percent chance of it occurring in any given year. That seems low. But when there are hundreds of different independent one-hundred-year events, what are the odds that one of them will occur in a given year? Pretty good.”
“Take the stock market. You can show people that the market historically crashes every five to seven years.”
“There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.”
“But there’s another story about the 1930s that rarely gets mentioned: it was, by far, the most productive and technologically progressive decade in U.S. history.”
“An important fact that explains a lot of things is that good news takes time but bad news tends to occur instantly.”
“The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth. Save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. Plan like a pessimist and dream like an optimist.”
“Another way to put this is that a lot of workers have ‘thought jobs’ without much time to think.”
“Another upside: Once you accept a certain level of inefficiency, you stop denying its existence and have a clearer view of how the world works.”
“It’s uncomfortable to think that what you haven’t experienced might change what you believe, because it’s admitting your own ignorance. It’s much easier to assume that those who disagree with you aren’t thinking as hard as you are.”
Who would enjoy this book?
Readers interested in larger concepts of human behavior related to finances and personal growth will likely enjoy Same as Ever.
Who would not enjoy this book?
Readers who desire a sequential flow of ideas and a narrative that doesn’t meander or who are only interested in reading about how to invest their money are unlikely to enjoy Same as Ever.
Conclusion
Same as Ever is an enjoyable book that focuses on predictable behaviors and patterns in an unpredictable future.
