The Undoing Project

I just finished Michael Lewis's new book The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.  As with many Michael Lewis books, it was a little uneven;  I feel like Lewis has license to write basically whatever he wants because he is Michael Lewis, after all, and he writes so well and has been so successful and has such incredible access.  In a sense, this is evidence of the sort of mean reversion that is observable in all human endeavors:  you can't be great in everything you do.

And part of my reaction to Lewis is, as I think I've shared before, jealousy and envy because I feel like I should be Michael Lewis, out writing about whatever the hell I want to and getting paid for it, as opposed to writing about whatever the hell I want to and not getting paid for it.

And so, the book. It is the story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their groundbreaking work in psychology that has impacted so many domains. Funny, I had always thought of them as psychologists whose main impact has been in economics, under the banner of behavioral economics, but it turns out that's just one epiphenomenon of their work, the one I've run into.

I have read other books about behavioral economics, usually I don't finish them. This one I finished, because, in the end, it was the story of the remarkable friendship between these two guys and its growing pains, how the one who appeared to be transcendentally brilliant (Tversky) got all the prizes as the two of them got traction, how his brilliance made him a difficult person which spoiled their theretofore incredibly tight friendship and partnership, then how they stuck together to the end nonetheless when Tversky got cancer that killed him fast and young. In the end, Kahneman got the Nobel, and has become more famous.

I cried at the end, and it made me appreciate my excellent friends. I called one today, whose dad is dying of cancer and is in the country for a few weeks. I had been too busy to do it of late, and couldn't make it to New York to see him. But it's OK.