The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

The Undoing Project is a biography of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists whose 1960s-1980s academic work would have an enormous influence on the emerging field of behavioral economics. Michael Lewis writes an engaging narrative about the two men’s lives — their collaborations, competitiveness, and eventual falling out. The book’s broader implications are elusive, but it nonetheless features a number of good insights into the nature of academic research and the creative process. I liked this quote from Tversky: “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”