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What it argues
Michael Lewis came to this subject sideways. After writing Moneyball, he received a letter pointing out that the Oakland A's statistical revolution had been anticipated by Israeli psychologists decades earlier. The psychologists were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who between the late 1960s and Tversky's death in 1996 produced the most influential body of work in behavioral economics through a collaboration so close it was described as a single mind in two bodies.
The Undoing Project, published in 2016, is the story of that collaboration — how two people from opposite psychological and intellectual temperaments met in Israel, recognized something in each other, and spent decades producing discoveries about how humans actually make judgments under uncertainty. It is partly a biography of both men, partly a history of ideas, and entirely Lewis's kind of book: driven by character and conflict, using narrative to make difficult ideas accessible.
What it gets right
- 1.
The availability heuristic leads people to judge probability by how easily examples come to mind. Events that are vivid, recent, or emotionally salient seem more probable than they are.
- 2.
The representativeness heuristic leads to errors when superficial resemblance to a prototype overrides base-rate information. The conjunction fallacy is its most famous demonstration.
- 3.
Loss aversion is not symmetric: losing a given amount hurts more than gaining the same amount feels good. This asymmetry shapes decisions in ways that are often irrational.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Michael Lewis is an American author and financial journalist whose books include Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short, and Flash Boys. He began his career at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s and has written about Wall Street, sports statistics, and government decision-making. His approach combines insider access with a gift for making complex systems and characters legible to a general audience. The Undoing Project was his most explicitly psychological book, and the most biographical.
