Book Review: The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis is one of our finest non-fiction writers, and any book of his is well worth reading. His subjects are drawn from areas one might not suspect of being of general interest - markets and sports. He has the ability to find the telling human detail and combine that with deep insight into general phenomena. Three of his books have been made into successful movies: Moneyball , The Blind Side , and The Big Short . Not bad for books ostensibly about, respectively, baseball statistics, the importance of offensive left tackles in football, and the great crash of 2007. Lewis's latest book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds , was inspired, he says, by a review of Moneyball by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein , two University of Chicago colleagues of President Obama who led the introduction into economics and law of the ideas originating from two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He begins with a story about basketball and the kind...