The salience of constancy

In an era when dictums such as "Change is the only constant" are drummed into us from an early age, Morgan Housel's book, Same as Ever is a call for understanding, and benefiting from, the constants amid the flux.

- SANJAY KUMAR SINGH

Humans are obsessed with change because it offers them something new and exciting. But there is also a deepseated desire within us for certainty, which leads us to try and peer into the future by resorting to predictions and forecasts.

Mr Housel, a seasoned financial writer with over 17 years of experience, was always struck by how bad we are at forecasting events, whether in the field of finance, economics, or politics. We fail to predict the next stock market fall, the next recession, the elections, and so on. (As he writes in this book, the number of economists who predicted the Great Depression was exactly zero.) And yet, pundits keep forecasting and people continue to follow them in droves - all because they fulfil our craving for certainty.

But if we are so bad at forecasting, especially events that take us by surprise and which, according to the author, are the only ones that truly matter, what is the way out? Over his years of reading and thinking, the author arrived at the notion that even in this constantly changing world, some things never change.