He came to their story surprisingly late. Michael Lewis, with his great gift for humanising complex and abstract ideas, is exactly the storyteller Tversky and Kahneman deserve. Tversky was a brilliant shaper of ideas, not an instigator, and recognised in Kahneman’s mind the raw material he needed They never made the mistake of thinking that the behaviour they described – of subconscious biases and illogical choices that skewed markets and misunderstood risk – did not also apply to themselves. Practising what they preached, their scientific papers were rigorous with fact and research but laced with memorable parable and anecdote. Kahneman and Tversky argued and proved that in the main humans decided things emotionally, not rationally – the trick was to recognise those habits, and not confuse one for the other. One of the Israeli duo’s observations was that “no one ever made a decision because of a number – they needed a story”. Their subsequent deep friendship and intellectual collaboration – a bromance that invented “behavioural economics” and established cognitive rules for human irrationality – has arguably done as much to define our world as, say, the intertwining between Francis Crick and James Watson. Chance and fate brought them together in Tel Aviv in the 1960s. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were both the grandsons of eastern European rabbis. No romance has been as alive to the fallibility of that process as the one described in this book. A ll love stories involve the science of decision making – for better or worse, richer or poorer.
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