The Story Behind Moneyball: How One Friendship Changed Everything from Baseball to Politics to the Science of Decision-Making
“Fallibility is not shameful. We are constructed to make certain kinds of mistakes. The trick is acknowledging that, not hiding it.”
Michael Lewis is the New York Times bestselling author of Moneyball, The Big Short, The Blind Side, and more. His most recent release, The Undoing Project, tells the story of the groundbreaking friendship between psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, whose collaboration led to huge changes in how we think about human behavior. For their work on prospect theory, Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, and their theories are outlined in his bestselling 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Michael Lewis recently joined Adam Grant, award-winning professor and author of Give and Take and Originals, for a conversation on The Undoing Project. Their conversation was recorded live at the Authors@Wharton speaker series.
This conversation has been edited and condensed. To view the full conversation, click the video below.
Adam: I want to start by talking about The Undoing Project, which really begins with Moneyball. Pick up where that left off and tell us where this book came from.
Michael Lewis: I saw a review by a pair of academics, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who made the point that Moneyball really wasn’t about baseball. It was about how markets misvalued people, so much so that people were able to find new and better ways to value players, find bargains, and operate like a financial trader in the market for players, with better information.
Read the full article here by Heleo.
