Upon conscription, Tversky signed up to be a paratrooper as part of an elite unit in the Israeli Defence Force, and later became a platoon commander. Despite having a gift for math and science, Tversky chose to pursue humanities in high school, with the belief that he could teach himself math. After completing his psychology degree at Hebrew University, he was posted to the psychology unit in the Israeli Defence Force, where he revamped the personnel selection test, which is still being used today.īorn to pioneers of modern Israel in 1937, Tversky unlike Kahneman spent most of his early life in Haifa. Nonetheless, Kahneman learnt to speak Hebrew fluently within a year, and after high school, he was identified as intellectually gifted, and was allowed to proceed to university directly instead of being conscripted into the military. After the war, Kahneman’s family moved back to Israel when he was around 13 years old, even though he did not speak a word of Hebrew. Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934, but spent most of his childhood years growing up in Paris with his family, and lived through the Holocaust of World War II. While they were both incredible Israeli scientists who eventually moved to the United States, Kahneman and Tversky both led very different lives. But it wasn’t their work or achievements that Michael Lewis wanted to focus on in this book – it was their one of a kind friendship.

Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, for the work that he and Tversky did in the psychology of judgment and decision-making, which revolutionised the way people understood economic sciences.

Ideally, it would also be best to have read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman before starting on The Undoing Project, to understand why Michael Lewis decided to write a biography of Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky.

We will start with a series of books on decision making psychology and behavioural economics (the type that I love), in the following order that I recommend for better appreciation: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, Misbehaving by Richard Thaler and Inside the Nudge Unit by David Halpern. After a 2-month hiatus, I’m back to blogging! But with many other things on my plate, I decided to keep it simple, and do some short reviews of books that I have read recently.

The undoing project review