Michael Lewis’ ‘Project’: It’ll blow your mind
In Michael Lewis’ new book, The Undoing Project (Norton, 352 pp., out of four), he describes the Nobel Prize-winning behavioral-finance theory that Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky created in the 1970s as “a truck packed with psychology that might be driven into the inner sanctums of economics and exploded.”
While Kahneman and Tversky were more genius than intellectual terrorist, their groundbreaking studies on how our minds trick us into making bad judgments were, and still are, nothing less than explosive.
Over the more than 40 years since, their theory has become one of the most influential in the history of economics. It not only single-handedly established behavioral economics as a bona fide field, it changed how other professions weigh objective evidence when making decisions.
To ease readers into this mind-blowing, demanding narrative, Lewis first recaps Moneyball, his 2003 best seller about the Oakland A’s employing a data-crunching Harvard economist who defied conventional baseball wisdom and won. That gamble changed Major League Baseball and led to Lewis tackling this heady prequel about everyday errant thinking. Little did he know when writing Moneyball that Kahneman and Tversky were the ones who corked the stats.
The author further prepares readers with a rollicking chapter about Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and his game-changing, data-analyzing approach to drafting National Basketball Association talent. Jeremy Lin, who knew? High concepts and eye-opening storytelling are Lewis’ forte. The author of The Blind Side, an MRI look inside the National Football League, and The Big Short, an exposé of the subprimemortgage collapse, he writes smart, inquisitive, high-tension books that seem easily turned into acclaimed films. But while the biographical parts of The Undoing Project seem movie-ready, the academic studies maybe not so much. Lewis is gifted at making scientific and financial jigsaw puzzles fit together easily. But, as Tversky and Kahneman are dismantling conventional economic theory later in the book, it’s slow going. Eventually, Tversky and Kahneman find paths into the everyday world where Moneyball becomes Moneymedicine, Moneylaw, Moneydiplomacy and so on. Their last collaboration, the Undoing Project, the book’s title, stands for much more. The Undoing Project studied the what-if thinking people do when coping with tragedy or loss by drifting into unrealized possibilities. For example: “if only he had missed that flight,” or “if only she had taken a different route.” A lot of thinking goes on in this book, electrifying thinking that will raise doubts about how you personally perceive reality. Not one of the most effortless books you’ll read, but this may be one of the best.