Author
Morgan Housel
The financial writer who argued that money is a soft skill, and that behaviour beats brilliance.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Morgan Housel is a partner at the Collaborative Fund, a venture firm, and was previously a columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal, where he wrote about investing and behaviour for a decade before the book.
The Psychology of Money began as a 2018 essay of the same name and was published as a book in 2020: twenty short chapters, each built around a story, arguing that doing well with money depends on behaviour rather than intelligence. It became one of the best-selling finance books of its decade and is widely translated.
He followed it in 2023 with Same as Ever, a book about the things that do not change in how people behave, and continues to write short essays at the Collaborative Fund.
The signature
Housel writes in stories rather than instructions: a janitor who died with millions, an executive who lost them, two novelists at a party. His signature is the short chapter that can be read alone, the refusal to recommend a product, and the claim, repeated in different forms, that the reasonable plan you can keep beats the optimal plan you cannot.