The past helps us look forward

To face life's challenges , from everyday ones to unexpected ones, you need common sense . And, in addition, the awareness that there are human vices and virtues, strengths and weaknesses, greatness and miseries that belong to us as a species and that we must learn to use or control as best we can .

Morgan Housel , economist and expert in the world of finance, places the certainties just listed at the center of his new essay, As always. Everything changes, nothing changes (Hoepli editore, 2024, pp. 222, also e-book).

Starting from his experience in the hyper-competitive world of financial investments, in this book Housel takes readers on a tour of the world to discover the behaviors that have played a decisive role in the great moments of history , from the invention of the first nuclear weapons to the founding of Amazon. Timeless lessons on risk, opportunity, and the art of living: valuable lessons on how to distinguish signal from noise and optimize decision-making. Stories to try to understand what remains unchanged even when everything around us is changing and appears unrecognizable, treacherous, insecure. The starting point is a simple awareness. As Voltaire said, for better or for worse "history never repeats itself, man always repeats himself".

If we could then travel in time, going back five hundred years, we would probably be amazed at how much technology and medicine have changed . The geopolitical structure would appear incomprehensible. The language and dialects may be completely unknown. According to Housel, however, we would realize that human behavior is based on universal principles: you would see people who fall victim to greed and fear, who let themselves be blinded by excess self-esteem and let themselves be persuaded by risk and jealousy, just like Today.

We will realize, for example, that we have never been good at predicting the future and we have never really known where we were going. So, as Housel writes: «to shed light on an uncertain future we try to look further ahead and squint more, to make predictions with more precision, more data and more intelligence. Much more effective is to do the opposite. Looking back and with a broader view. Rather than trying to understand the small details that could change the future, it is better to study the big things that the past was never able to avoid."

What is then needed is history, knowledge of History with a capital H. Well, history serves to make us understand, for example, that all of us are the product of a long story, a story that has extensive and complex roots but which go to make up who we are today. History has a lot to tell us, in fact, if we stop considering it as something objective, external to us, if we stop considering it a pure list of battles , emperors and kings - which is also good to know - and see it as made up of people who have had emotions, who have lived lives we can relate to . The moment we remember that we are part of a flow, of the passage of time, then history puts itself at our service, because we can put ourselves, our values, the world in which we live to the test with the more or less distant past . The historical event is, in fact, an enormous pool of precedents, which can serve as a guide. In short, it is an enormous training ground for life and the great problems of the world around us. History is full of surprises that no one could have predicted, but if we are aware of the truths that never change we will be able to make more informed choices, whatever the future holds. Word of Morgan Housel.