The Undoing Project

Book Review : The Undoing Project

Author : Michael Lewis

My Rating : 4 out of 5 stars

The complete title of the book is “The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds”.

Michael Lewis is one of the most famous authors of our time. He has written many best sellers, and a few of his books have been made into successful movies. His latest book tackles a subject that is perhaps far more fundamental than his other books.

The scientific advancements that have happened in last few decades have had a huge impact on our understanding of the world. That includes not just about the universe and subatomic particles, but also about the evolution and our own mind. How our mind thinks, and how it comes to conclusion is a topic that interests me greatly. I am not talking about the anatomy of brain, but the thought process and its implications.

A big contribution to the very foundation of what we know today, was laid in 70s and 80s by two scientists in Israel - Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their work on coming up with a model of decision making  - “Prospect Theory” as they called it - is one of the cornerstones of a new field that emerged from it - “Behavioral Economics”. Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky had passed away then, and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously). Later other economists have also won the Nobel Prize due to their contribution to Behavioral Economics. This is field that intersects both Economics and Psychology.

This book tells the story of how these two very different personalities came to collaborate together in Israel. It starts at their childhood, their early careers in Israel of the 60s, how the wars impacted them and how they came to be collaborators. The author also goes into many details to explain their personalities and their friendship. A lot of research must have been done to gather this information, and kudos to the author.

The book tries to be both a biographical account and a primer on their work. It works very well, although the focus in mainly on the human story. The scientific work and the explanation is interspersed with the life stories. I think it’s very well done. This way the reader is not overwhelmed with the technical details, and the biography doesn’t remain just a story of two extraordinarily talented people. The aim is to also convey how their work came into existence and how seminal it it was, and the book succeeds.

I could have given this 5 stars, and some readers may very well do so. There are two reasons for my not giving 5 stars to this book. The biography part, on a few occasions, felt repetitive. Especially, about how like Amos Tversky was. After a few times, I was saying, yes, yes, yes, we get it - He was a popular figure. Second reason is, the explanation of the ideas in Prospect Theory is good, not great. I won’t recommend this as a popular science book. If you want to read how we handle uncertainty then I can recommend to you The Drunkard’s Walk, or The Improbability Principle. If you want to read about how we think, then I can recommend to you, The Righteous Mind and Some We Love, Some We Hate and Some We Eat. None of these are on Behavioral Economics, but they do a great job of explaining their respective ideas.

With that said, I can definitely recommend this book. It’s very readable, has great story-telling and has enough educational material. It’s a story of two great minds, whose work is profoundly impacting Economics and something worth knowing about.