Michael Lewis ’82’s New Book Explores a Legendary Partnership

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 The book: Michael Lewis ’82’s latest book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (W.W. Norton & Co.), was conceived of after Lewis read a “generous and damning” review of his 2003 book Moneyball. (Moneyball, like Lewis’ The Blind Side and The Big Short, later became an Oscar-nominated film.) The book, the review said, had told a compelling story, but it had also brushed past the core reason that the market for baseball players was as inefficient as it was: cognitive biases. And Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a pair of Israeli psychologists, had already laid out exactly how those cognitive biases worked.

The Undoing Project is the story of the partnership between Tversky and Kahneman. Though they may have seemed like an unlikely pair — Tversky was confident and extroverted, while Kahneman was introverted and diffident — they went on to have “one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science,” ultimately founding the field of behavioral economics. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School.

The author: Michael Lewis studied art history at Princeton. A writer and financial journalist, he is the author of 14 other books, including Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Moneyball, and Liar’s Poker.

Opening lines: “Back in 2003 I published a book, called Moneyball, about the Oakland Athletics’ quest to find new and better ways to value baseball players and evaluate baseball strategies. The team had less money to spend on players than other teams, and so its management, out of necessity, set about rethinking the game. In both new and old baseball data — and the work of people outside the game who had analyzed that data — the Oakland front office discovered what amounted to new baseball knowledge.”

Reviews: Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, says, “I read Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods. I’ll never play like that. But it’s good to be reminded every now and again what genius looks like.”