"Brilliant. . . . Lewis has given us a spectacular account of two great men who faced up to uncertainty and the limits of human reason." --William Easterly, Wall Street Journal
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky's extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize-winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 354-360).
Table of contents provided by Syndetics
Introduction: The Problem that Never Goes Away (p. 15)
*Starred Review* Early on in bestselling Lewis' latest inquiry (Flash Boys, 2014; The Big Short, 2010), he appears to have hatched a hybrid of sorts: a biography of two gifted Israeli psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, fused with a primer on the field of cognitive and mathematical psychology. But with each page, the book reveals itself as a radiant if cerebral romance about two brilliant minds, novel ideas, truth, country, and duty. The psychologists' personalities could not have been more different. Tversky was a charismatic genius, a fearless thinker and warrior who served his country as a paratrooper and platoon commander. Kahneman, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Paris and ended up serving as a psychologist for the Israel Defense Force, is portrayed as philosophical, continuously in need of approval by others, and possessing a depressive disposition. As opposite as these men seem to be, Lewis writes, They'd become a single mind, creating ideas about why people did what they did, and cooking up odd experiments to test them. Tversky, in particular, was fascinated by how people make decisions and looked for ways to undo accepted theories of decision-making. Their intellectual synergy produced provocative and groundbreaking theories about the workings of the human mind, including the origin of biases and the mechanisms responsible for mental errors and for formulating judgments. They challenged intuition and gut instincts, relying instead on carefully constructed algorithms which invariably proved to be more reliable than expert opinions. Tversky and Kahneman's publications made psychology increasingly relevant to medicine, law, and public policy, while their treatise, Prospect Theory, became essential to the understanding of behavioral economics. Clear in its explanation of complex subjects, tantalizing and tender, Lewis' chronicle of a scientifically fruitful friendship reveals not only what made two talented intellects click, but also what makes the rest of us tick. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lewis is an irresistible storyteller and a master at illuminating complicated and fascinating subjects and his fans will follow his lead, wherever he goes.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2017 Booklist