Book Review: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis is very good at what he does. In this case, it takes much of his writer acumen and perspicacious observations to make this book better than good.

The topic is: why do people make the decisions that they do? A subject that he is quite acquainted with since his successful telling of the disturbing and head scratching tendencies of major league baseball decision makers to base their decisions on anything but measureable metrics in Moneyball. Actually, it was due to the fact that many people kept telling him to read Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work that he happened upon the two psychologists/economists.

While the subject matter piqued his interest, the story behind the two friends and their collaboration is what drives this story. It was pure and unadulterated love between two friends. It was the friendship of a lifetime, if we are lucky enough to find someone that we are so in tuned with in our working life.

To complicate things, Danny Kahneman had written a best seller titled Thinking: Fast and Slow. He had undertaken this book because he had received the Nobel prize in economics for the groundbreaking work that he and Tversky had done together over the years, but he got the Nobel and Tversky did not because he had passed away before the Nobel was awarded. Kahneman’s book is a dense but very readable- as readable as a research oriented book on human nature can be- tome on their collaborative partnership.

So Michael Lewis undertook a nearly impossible task, to combine a story of a friendship that is so complete while drilling down into the research in human behavior and doing the yeoman’s work of summarizing that work for the lay audience; AND do so without duplicating or infringing upon the book authored by one of his subjects,

By all accounts, he acquitted himself valiantly. This book is a clear eyed account of an admirable friendship and partnership. He was able to dig deep into their relationship, portray their collaboration honestly and also delve into what eventually led to the dissolution of that relationship. The pioneering work in psychology was also explained concisely but also precisely. No excessive words or digressions were employed in the recitation of the results; the experiments were explained cleanly and efficiently. The story of the research would seemingly be de-emphasized in view of the more audience pleasing aspect of the friendship, but Lewis managed to not have given short shrift to the academic results, a rather large component of the story.

In the end, the story worked in Lewis’ hands. He conveyed the emotions and pathos of the friendship while also regaled us with the significance and importance of the research. A very masterful accomplishment indeed.