The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Author: Michael Lewis

How often do you get to witness first-hand the birth of a new field of study. At the start of the third millennium, I  started seeing the term “Behavioral Economics” pop up all over the place and the book Freakonomics, that was published in 2005 clearly established this as a mainstream subject. It blends a little bit of psychology with basic economic principles and voila you find out more about how our mind works — or sometimes, more appropriately, doesn’t. 

This book chronicles the life of two pioneers who gave birth to this new subject and published some of the most seminal work in behavioral economics. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman could not have been more different, but they shared a common passion of wanting to understand irrational human economic choices.  They spent more than a decade working closely together at Hebrew University developing a deep understanding of how people make decisions and the inherent cognitive biases that we all are susceptible to. 

A good part of their formative years were spent in the Israeli Military and Michael does a great job of recounting those experiences. He weaves the story of their lives along with details on the theories that they developed. In parts the book struggles to hold the readers attention and I wonder if a general reader will be interested enough to complete the book.