Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Electricity becoming a “willing servant”—introducing washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators—freed up hours of household labor in a way that let female workforce participation rise. It’s a trend that lasted more than half a century and is a key driver of both twentieth-century growth and gender equality.

The big takeaway here is that we really have no idea what policies we’ll be pushing for in, say, five or ten years. Unexpected hardship makes people do and think things they’d never imagine when things are calm. Your personal views fall into the same trap. In investing, saying “I will be greedy when others are fearful” is easier said than done, bec

But more importantly, they’re home to Really Big Problems That Need to Be Solved Right Now. Innovation is driven by incentives, which come in many forms.

The big question is whether the technical leap of the 1930s could have happened without the devastation of the Depression. And I think the answer is no—at least not to the extent that it occurred.

Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure for the risk and reward in a given moment.

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

Carved on the wall at University of Chicago is a quote from Lord Kelvin that says, “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” He’s not wrong, but the danger is assuming that if something can’t be measured it doesn’t matter. The opposite is true: Some of the most important forces in the world—particularly those regarding

In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged—wherever there are products, companies, careers, poli

Van Valen called it the Red Queen hypothesis of evolution. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice meets the Red Queen in a land where you have to run just to stay in place: