Important things rarely have one cause, and four other things we can learn from Covid-19
"Part of what’s made Covid dangerous is that we got so good at preventing pandemics in the last century that few people before January 2020 assumed an infectious disease would ever impact their lives." Image Joint Base San Antonio via CC
"There are two kinds of history to learn from.
"One is the specific events. What did this person do right? What did that country do wrong? What ideas worked? What strategies failed?
"It’s most of what we pay attention to, because specific stories are easy to find.
"But their usefulness is limited.
"The second kind of history to learn from are the broad behaviors that show up again and again, in multiple fields and different eras. They are the 30,000-foot takeaways from events that hide layers below the main story, often going ignored.
"How do people think about risk? How do they react to surprise? What motivates them, and causes them to be overconfident, or too pessimistic? Those broad lessons are important because we know they’ll be relevant in the future. They’ll apply to nearly everyone, and in many fields. The same rule of thumb works in the other direction: the broader the lesson, the more useful it is for the future.
"Let me offer one of those lessons from Covid-19. I think it’s one of the most important lessons of history:" - Morgan Housel
Article: The Big Lessons from History