Same as Ever: Timeless Lessons on Risk, Opportunity and Living a Good Life

Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.

When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage.

“The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!”

But constant uncertainty, misunderstanding, and the inability to know what people will do next is the truth.

The next is accepting that what’s rational to one person can be crazy to another. Everything would compute if everyone had the same time horizon, goals, ambitions, and risk tolerances. But they don’t.

Economist Alex Field wrote that 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. Everyone simply became staggeringly more productive.

The Depression practically flipped a switch: a fringe idea was suddenly embraced. The Social Security Act was passed in 1935, 372–33 in the House of Representatives and 77–6 in the Senate.

Actual circumstances don’t make much difference in all these cases. What generates the emotion is the

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.