The Assumption behind Conventional Economics is that human beings behave rationally. In my opinion this is one of the reasons why western society is experiencing the strains it is today. Not everything can be explained by Finance and Economics. Behavioural Economics plugs this gap. The Undoing project is a story about Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, whose thinking led to the ideas of Behavioural Economics.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved; Tversky a voluble, instinctual blur of energy. In this breathtaking new book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of a relationship that became a shared mind: one which created the field of behavioural economics, revolutionising everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football. Kahneman and Tversky, shows Michael Lewis, helped shape the world in which we now live – and may well have changed, for good, humankind’s view of its own mind.