Author
Daniel Kahneman
The psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how people actually decide.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Daniel Kahneman, born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and raised partly in occupied France, spent his career at the Hebrew University, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. With Amos Tversky he mapped the systematic errors in human judgement, work that produced prospect theory and earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, awarded to a psychologist for changing economics.
Thinking, Fast and Slow, published in 2011, is his account of that life's work for a general reader: two systems of thought, the fast intuitive one and the slow deliberate one, and the biases that follow from letting the first do the second's job. He died in March 2024.
The signature
Kahneman's signature is doubt applied with rigor, above all to himself. He treats confidence as a feeling rather than evidence, distrusts stories that explain too neatly, and keeps returning to the gap between how a decision feels and how it will look later. The prose is patient and unflattering, and it is precisely why readers trust it.