The Unlikely Friendship That Changed the Way We Look at Human Behavior

For the past several years, the shelves of airport bookstores from LAX to JFK have groaned under the weight of nonfiction works exploiting ideas that originated with Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky: one-syllable titles such as Nudge, Blink, and Drive; Predictably Irrational and The Power of Habit; and Kahneman’s own Thinking, Fast and Slow. In various ways, these books explain or expand on the scholars’ groundbreaking discovery that, contrary to what economists long assumed, we’re wired to make mistakes. Doctors misdiagnose illnesses, savers blow their money, and generals put troops in harm’s way because of heuristics—mental shortcuts—that don’t work.

In The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds ($28.95, W.W. Norton), Michael Lewis has found a compelling way to mine this seam. He’ll likely get another movie out of it; if you saw The Blind Side, Moneyball, or The Big Short, you have Lewis to thank for the raw material. He casts Danny and Amos, as he refers to his protagonists, as mismatched men who enjoyed an intellectual bond so intense that it resembled a marriage. “What they were like, in every way but sexually, was lovers,” Lewis writes in what will probably be the book’s most quoted sentence. The Undoing Project is a history of the birth of behavioral economics, but it’s also Lewis’s testament to the power of collaboration.