The Undoing Project

3.5 stars

Author
American. Started out as a bond trader for Salomon Brothers (an investment bank later taken over by Citigroup) in the mid-1980s. He drew on that experience to produce 'Liar's Poker' (1989), which kickstarted a stellar career as a non-fiction author. His favoured technique is to tell a story through potted biographies of a range of quirky individuals involved in the subject of interest. Among the 15 titles Lewis has published so far are the blockbusters 'Moneyball' (2003), 'The Blind Side' (2006), and 'The Big Short' (2010), all of which were made into successful movies. Despite copping plenty of criticism for inaccuracies in his writing - at least some of it sour grapes - his easy style is very appealing to lay readers and he continues to shift product off the shelves apace.

Summary
After 'Moneyball' appeared, many hailed Lewis's insights into the vagaries of human decision-making as revolutionary, anointing him the new guru of baseball. Then Chicago economist Richard Thaler, along with lawyer and one-time Obama staffer Cass Sunstein, pointed out that Nobel laureate Israeli-American behavioural psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had made identical observations years before. To his credit, Lewis, who had never heard of Kahneman and Tversky, decided to track them down and learn more. Tversky was already dead, making him a poor interview subject, but Lewis found plenty of people ready to share their memories of an extremely colourful personality. The author also learned that, while Tversky was the life of the party, Daniel Kahneman, now mid-eighties, was his polar opposite - reticent socially but still working, writing, and teaching. The result is a book unlike anything else Mr Lewis has written, in that he restricts his character profiles to just two people, both truly remarkable individuals but even better as a team - think Lennon and McCartney not Kanye and Kim.

Bottom line
The prose is as crisp and clear as ever and the subject material is interesting, but I found the whole thing slightly disappointing for some reason. If you want to know more about behavioural economics - and who wouldn't - I recommend Mr Kahneman's most recent book, 'Thinking Fast and Slow' (2011), which is excellent.

I have read quite a few of Michael Lewis' books and I did not enjoy this one as much. It is worth a read, the ideas discussed within are interesting, however I found the ideas a little repetitive throughout the book.