We all make mis­takes. It’s an obvi­ous state­ment with not-so-obvi­ous impli­ca­tions. The sto­ry of these unex­pect­ed con­se­quences is at the heart of best-sell­ing author Michael Lewis’ (Flash Boys, The Big Short, Mon­ey­ball, The Blind Side) lat­est work, The Undo­ing Project.

The focus of this book is not a per­son, or even two peo­ple, but the rela­tion­ship between two extra­or­di­nary Israeli minds, those of Amos Tver­sky and Dan­ny Kah­ne­man. Tver­sky was a bril­liant and brash econ­o­mist with an inter­est in psy­chol­o­gy. He was rude and fas­ci­nat­ing, a Holo­caust sur­vivor and a dec­o­rat­ed Israeli war hero. He was the guy every­one want­ed to talk to at a par­ty. Kah­ne­man, who read­ers may rec­og­nize as the best-sell­ing author of Think­ing Fast and Slow, was a psy­chol­o­gist. A well­spring of ideas and crit­i­cal thought, he was also brood­ing and doubt­ful. Like Tver­sky, he was a sol­dier, but a more intel­lec­tu­al one. As Lewis faith­ful­ly points out, any descrip­tion would fall short of encom­pass­ing the com­plex­i­ty of these men. His book is an effort to do them justice.

Lewis describes the ear­ly years of the col­lab­o­ra­tion between Tver­sky and Khane­man as noth­ing short of a mind-meld. They com­plet­ed each other’s ideas; nei­ther knew where their thoughts began or end­ed. It was a love sto­ry of the intel­lect that changed the way we under­stand the way our minds work. Tver­sky and Khane­man proved, through a series of bril­liant exper­i­ments, that our mind plays tricks on us just like the visu­al illu­sions that make us ques­tion whether we are look­ing at a vase or the pro­file of two faces.

This recog­ni­tion led to the rise of a whole new field called behav­ioral eco­nom­ics, which doesn’t see deci­sion mak­ing as ratio­nal, but rather influ­enced by the quirks of the mind. It also brought into ques­tion the entire notion of exper­tise, and let to the growth of algo­rithm-based deci­sion mak­ing in med­i­cine and pol­i­cy. It also result­ed, even­tu­al­ly, in a Nobel prize.

Lewis is known for bring­ing human­i­ty and thrill to tech­ni­cal sto­ries, and he again brings his world-class jour­nal­is­tic pow­ers of research and analy­sis to the sub­ject of The Undo­ing Project. He does an exem­plary job trans­lat­ing some­what arcane aca­d­e­m­ic works to eas­i­ly acces­si­ble pop science.

The read­er should be aware that this book is not a page-turn­er. The plot is fair­ly thin and seems to lose its way in the mid­dle, where a clos­er adher­ence to chronol­o­gy would have helped build a stronger under­stand­ing of the pres­sures act­ing on Tver­sky and Khaneman’s rela­tion­ship. How­ev­er, The Undo­ing Project is a slow burn, one that is well worth the read because it becomes hot­ter and hot­ter as the sto­ry progresses. 

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