Books

Books : reviews

Michael Lewis.
The Undoing Project: a friendship that changed the world.
Penguin. 2017

rating : 2.5 : great stuff
review : 22 April 2025

In 1969 two men met on a university campus. Their names were Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They were different in every way. But both were obsessed with the human mind – and both happened to be geniuses. This is the incredible story of how their friendship would change the way we see the world.

This is an account of the lives of two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, both geniuses, each with very different personalities, who worked closely together over many years, reshaping the way we think about economic behaviour. Together, they transcended their individual abilities, and transformed ideas about how people make decisions, not at all like the psychologically unreal “rational agents” of economic theory, but instead with their various biases and preferences, aversions, risk-taking behaviours, inability to reason statistically, and more. A fascinating read.