Michael Lewis tells the compelling story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose behaviourist theories led to his own bestseller Moneyball

Michael Lewis, with his great gift for humanising complex and abstract ideas, is exactly the storyteller Tversky and Kahneman deserve. He came to their story surprisingly late. Lewis’s landmark 2003 book Moneyball described the ways in which the Oakland Athletics baseball team had employed scientific data analysis rather than instinct and experience to mould a successful team. That strategy, unbeknown to Lewis, had its intellectual roots in papers written by Kahneman and Tversky 30 years earlier, but which were only then becoming mainstream thinking. Lewis’s omission was made clear in a review by Richard H. Thaler, the Chicago professor and co-author of Nudge, who had done much to promote and extend the Israeli pair’s thinking.

It was only after that review that Lewis read Kahneman and Tversky’s work and realised the limitation of what he had written in Moneyball (which itself became a phenomenon): “I’d set out to tell a story about the way markets worked, or failed to work, especially when they were valuing people,” he says. “But buried somewhere inside it was another story, one that I’d left unexplored and untold, about the way the human mind worked, or failed to work, when it was forming judgments and making decisions.” This book puts that omission right.

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