I recently finished an excellent book by acclaimed storyteller, Michael Lewis, called “The Undoing Project”. I read the book on a Kindle and used my Goodreads account to keep all my highlights and notes. I really, really like this book. And the large number of highlights and notes on my Goodreads account shows it.

This book is about the friendship and intellectual collaboration between Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. It appealed to me for several reasons. It challenged my fiscally conservative beliefs about the efficiency of markets and about the claim that humans are rational. It confirmed my realism about human nature. And most importantly it forced me to rethink my libertarish stances on public policy and better appreciate the public policies espoused by both the Right and the Left. And all because two brilliant intellectuals from Israel challenged the belief that humans are rational and showed the harmful effects in all facets of life from military recruiting, professional basketball, business decisions, and elections. Their view can be summed up from their simple critique of traditional economics: “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.”

Read the book about this story of the original behavioral economists. These guys brought credibility to the new field that spawned Freakonomics and inspired work of countless first rate intellectuals such as Nasim Taleb and Malcolm Gladwell and even the author of the story - Michael Lewis.