summary ofThe Undoing ProjectBook by Michael Lewis

first KEY POINT

The human mind's role in baseball and beyond

In 2003, Michael Lewis wrote a book titled “Moneyball,” which was centered around the desire to improve the value of baseball players and evaluate the strategies used in the game. When the book was published, some baseball experts didn’t respond well to it; however, many readers loved the book. Michael Lewis found the responses of economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein noteworthy. They argued that Lewis wasn’t aware that the significant reason baseball players were sometimes inefficient was due to the inner workings of the human mind. Thaler and Sunstein also said some baseball experts judge baseball players based on their (expert’s) minds. Thaler and Sunstein went ahead to say that this theory was previously described by Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At that point, Michael Lewis discovered that his book — Moneyball — wasn’t original; it was similar to the idea Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had worked on in the 90s. This spurred Lewis to research the personal life and works of these psychologists.

In this summary, you will learn how the human mind operates when making judgments and decisions. You will also be exposed to how Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky stumbled onto this theory.