Chapter Content
Okay, so, let's talk about this really interesting…scenario, right? Imagine this kid, Jason Kay. He's, like, 14, homeless, living in some big American city. Super shy, doesn't really connect with people, but, you know, he's got a lot of street smarts. His dad was murdered years ago, mom's struggling with addiction, he's basically raising himself. He crashes on couches sometimes, but mostly he's on the streets. Goes to school hungry, manages to get to ninth grade. And then, one day, some drug dealers get to him, and he starts selling drugs, you know, skipping school and everything. A few weeks later, the night before his 15th birthday, he's killed in a shootout. He didn't even have a weapon.
So, let's play a little thought experiment here. Let's imagine a different outcome for Jason. Now, order these scenarios by how likely you think they are. Okay?
One: Jason's father wasn't murdered back then.
Two: Jason had a gun and could defend himself in that shootout.
Three: The U.S. federal government has a program where homeless kids get free breakfast and lunch. Jason wouldn't have been hungry enough to start selling drugs in the first place.
Four: A lawyer, who, like, totally gets Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman's work, starts working for the government in 2009. Because of their ideas, he changes the system, so homeless kids don't even need to be in school to get free meals. Jason wouldn't be hungry and selling drugs.
Now, if you think number four is more likely than number three, you might be breaking a basic rule of probability. But, uh, you probably noticed the lawyer mentioned, right? His name is Cass Sunstein.
Now, Amos and Daniel, they did some really influential research that, like, showed economists and policymakers how important psychology is. Like, Peter Diamond, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, said he became a total believer in their work. He said that, you know, their stuff wasn't just some lab experiment. It was based on reality and really changed economics. And, he goes on, he spent years trying to figure out how to use it, but he just couldn't quite get there.
You know, back in the 90s, people thought economists and psychologists should, like, talk more. But, it turned out those two groups just, uh, they didn't really click. Economists were, maybe a little arrogant, and psychologists were too skeptical, or something. As Dan Gilbert, a psychologist, said, generally, psychologists interrupt to clarify, economists interrupt to show how smart they are. It's funny.
George Loewenstein, an economist, said being, you know, kind of, like, aggressive was normal in economics. They tried to have a conference together, but the psychologists just, like, gave up after the first session and, well, the conference was done. Steven Sloman even had to tell the economists to be quiet, like, three-quarters of the time at one conference. Another psychologist, Amy Cuddy said they just didn’t respect each other. Psychologists thought economists were immoral, economists thought psychologists were dumb. Ouch.
So, in this, like, academic battle between psychology and economics, Amos was kind of the strategist, you know? He understood economists, at least in some ways. His ideas went against a lot of psychology. He wasn't into studying emotions, but he was interested in unconscious thinking, but really just to prove it didn't exist. He was kind of an outsider, you know? Like, wearing stripes in a world of dots and squares. Like economists, he liked, uh, organized models, and he thought being aggressive was normal, too. And, like them, he wanted his ideas to spread. Economics had already influenced finance, business, public policy. Psychology hadn't even gotten close. It was time for a change.
Both Daniel and Amos thought, you know, just shoving psychology at economists wouldn't work. They wouldn't listen. What they needed were young economists who were already interested in psychology. And, it turns out, they found some. George Loewenstein was one of them. He was trained in economics, but he started to question his field because of how psychology was breaking down economic models. After reading Amos and Daniel's stuff, Loewenstein thought, hey, maybe I should study psychology! It turns out his great-grandfather was Sigmund Freud. “I had always wanted to escape the family influence,” Loewenstein said, “I realized that I had never taken a class that interested me." He even reached out to Amos for advice about switching from economics to psychology. Amos said, "'You should stay in economics, we need you there.'" He knew back then, in 1982, that he was starting something. He needed someone on the inside.
So, this fight between psychology and economics that Daniel and Amos started, it spread to law and public policy. Economics actually became a way for psychology to influence those fields. Richard Thaler was the first economist to really get into Daniel and Amos's work, and he started exploring how psychology affects economics, and, helped create a new field called "behavioral economics." At first, their “prospect theory” wasn't cited much, but by 2010, it was the second most cited term in economics journals. Thaler said, "Some people still don't accept it; old-school economists never changed their minds." And, by 2016, about one in ten economics papers used behavioral economics. That meant Daniel and Amos's work was being cited, at the very least.
When Thaler was first championing psychology, Cass Sunstein, that lawyer we talked about, was a young law professor. He read Thaler's article, “Paternalism and Consumer Choice”, and through its references, found Daniel and Amos's paper on "prospect theory" in the journal *Science*. “Both articles were tough to read for a lawyer,” Sunstein said, “I read them more than once, but I clearly remember the first time: It was like seeing a bunch of lightbulbs exploding in front of me. After reading it, some ideas in my mind became clear immediately, which was so exciting.” And later, in 2009, Sunstein went to work in the White House for President Obama. He was in charge of evaluating and monitoring policies that affected people's daily lives.
Sunstein's work was influenced by Daniel and Amos's research. Obama didn't ban federal employees from texting while driving *because* of Daniel and Amos's research, but there was a connection. The government was now paying attention to loss aversion and framing effects, because people don't choose things, they choose how things are presented. Instead of saying how many miles per gallon a car gets, new car stickers showed how many gallons of gas it takes to drive 100 miles. And, instead of the food pyramid, Americans now used "MyPlate," which divided a plate into five sections representing different food groups. With a picture, people suddenly found it easy to eat healthy. There were tons of examples. Sunstein also suggested that the government should have a council of psychological advisors, in addition to economic advisors. Some people supported the idea. By the time Sunstein left the White House in 2015, many countries' governments recognized the importance of psychologists, or at least psychological ideas.
Sunstein was really interested in what we now call "choice architecture." The choices people make depend on how those choices are presented. Sometimes, people don't know what they want, so they take cues from the context. They "frame" their preferences. In doing so, they choose the easiest path, even if it costs them a lot. In the 2000s, millions of employees and government workers no longer had to apply to join a retirement plan. They were automatically enrolled. This small change increased the number of people in retirement plans by almost 30%. That's the power of choice architecture. When Sunstein was in the government, he made some changes to social choice architecture, one of which was to make sure homeless kids got free school meals. The year after he left the White House, more than 40% more students were getting free meals than before. Before, these kids had to work to get this benefit themselves or have someone advocate for them.
Even in Canada, Don Redelmeier could still hear Amos's voice. He'd been back from Stanford for years, but Amos's voice was still so clear and loud that he often forgot to listen to himself. At some point, Redelmeier realized that he had also contributed to the work he had done with Amos—not just Amos alone. What really made him realize his own value was a simple question: homeless people. This group was a burden on the local healthcare system. Whether they needed to or not, they were always in the hospital's emergency room, using up resources. Nurses in every hospital in Toronto knew that if they saw these people in the hospital, they had to get them out ASAP. Redelmeier didn't think this was a good idea.
So, in 1991, he did an experiment. He recruited a bunch of college students interested in healthcare, got them a chance to volunteer at the hospital, and set up a lounge for them outside the emergency room. When a homeless person came to the ER, these students would take care of them, give them juice, get them food, talk to them, and help them get their medicine. The students were all volunteers, but they were excited because they got to act like doctors. But, according to Redelmeier's plan, only half of the homeless people who came to the hospital would get this treatment. The other half would be turned away by the nurses. After the experiment, Redelmeier tracked these people to see if their use of Toronto's healthcare resources had changed. As expected, the homeless people who got the guided service came back to the hospital slightly more often than the other group. But, surprisingly, they went to other, better hospitals less often. When they felt cared for at one hospital, they stopped going to other hospitals. They said, "This is the best treatment I can get." Treating homeless people badly was costing Toronto's healthcare industry.
Good science isn't just about seeing what others have seen. It's also about thinking about what others haven't said. Amos had told him this quote and it was now ingrained in Redelmeier's mind. In the mid-90s, Redelmeier put this principle into practice in a surprising way. One day, he got a call from an AIDS patient who said he was having side effects from his medication. The patient then interrupted their call and said, "Sorry, Dr. Redelmeier, I have to go, there's an accident." It turned out that the guy was driving while on the phone. Redelmeier wondered if talking on the phone while driving increased the risk of accidents.
In 1993, he and Robert Tibshirani, a statistician at Cornell University, began a complex study to answer this question. In 1997, they published their findings: Talking on the phone while driving was as risky as driving drunk. People who talked on the phone while driving were four times more likely to have an accident, whether they were holding the phone or not. They were the first to discover the link between cell phones and traffic accidents, which led to better traffic laws around the world. To know how many people were saved as a result of this article, a more complex study would be needed.
After this, Redelmeier became interested in the thinking of drivers. The doctors at Sunnybrook Hospital's trauma center thought their job started when the injured from accidents on Highway 401 were brought into the ER. But Redelmeier thought medical treatment should start with analyzing the cause of the injury, otherwise it wasn't right. 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents every year around the world, and millions more are permanently disabled. Redelmeier said, "1.2 million per year worldwide is like a tsunami in Japan every day. This kind of death and injury from traffic accidents would not have happened 100 years ago." The fact that people's mistakes behind the wheel could have irreversible consequences excited Redelmeier. The brain has limitations, and our attention has gaps. The brain hides those gaps, so we don't see them. We think we know, but we don't. We think we're safe, but we're not. "This is one of Amos's main concerns," Redelmeier said, "It's not because people are thinking wrong. No, no. People make mistakes. The real reason is that people don't know how wrong they can be. 'I had three or four drinks, there's probably a 5% chance I'm impaired.' No! There's a 30% chance you're impaired. This misjudgment is what causes 10,000 fatal accidents in the US every year."
Sometimes it's easier to change the world than to prove you did change the world.
This is another thing Amos used to say. "Amos often reminded us to accept human error," Redelmeier said. Although it cannot be proven, Amos did change the world in this way. His ideas have been used in Redelmeier's research. Amos had read and commented on that article about how talking on the phone while driving increases the risk of accidents. It was while working on that article that Redelmeier learned that Amos had died.
Amos only told a few people about his illness, and he told them not to talk about it too much. He got the news from the doctor in February of 1996, and after that, he started talking about his life in the past tense. “He called me and said that the doctor told him he didn’t have long to live,” Avishai Margalit said, “I went to see him, and he even picked me up at the airport. On the way back to Palo Alto, we stopped on the side of the road to look at the view and talked about life and death. He thought it was good to know that death was coming, and the detachment he showed was surprising, as if he were talking about someone else, not himself. He said, ‘Life is like a book, it doesn’t matter how thick it is, it matters if the content is exciting enough.’" Amos seemed to think that dying young was a price he had to pay as a Spartan warrior.
In May, Amos gave his last lecture at Stanford on statistical errors in professional basketball. Craig Fox, a former graduate student and partner of his, asked if he should record it. “He thought for a while and said, ‘No need.’” Fox recalled. Amos lived as usual, and even communicated with those around him as usual. The only difference was that he started talking about his war experiences. He told Varda Lieberman how he had saved an unconscious soldier from a bomb. Lieberman said, “He thought that this event had somehow influenced his life. He said, ‘Since then, I feel that I must maintain the image of a hero. Because I have been a hero, I must always try to live up to the standard of a hero.’"
Most people who knew Amos didn't realize he was seriously ill. One graduate student asked Amos if he could be his doctoral advisor, but Amos just said that “I’ll be busy in the next few years” and then sent the student home. A few weeks before his death, he called his old friend Yeshayahu Klochendler in Israel. Klochendler recalled: “His voice sounded impatient, which I had never heard before. He said, ‘Listen, Yeshayahu, I’m dying. I don’t think it’s a tragedy, but I don’t want to talk to anyone. Please tell our friends, tell them not to call or come to see me.’” He would still let Varda Lieberman see him—the two were working on a textbook together. Another person who could see him was Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford University, because Amos had heard that Stanford was planning a series of lectures and academic conferences in his name to commemorate him after his death. Lieberman recalled: “Amos told Casper, ‘You can do whatever you want, but I beg you, don’t hold a conference in my name, don’t let a bunch of mediocre people chatter with their articles and claim that they have something to do with me. Put my name on the outside of the building, leave it in the room, or put it on a bench, as long as it stays on a fixed object.’"
He almost never answered the phone anymore. Only once did he answer a call from the economist Peter Diamond. “I heard he was seriously ill,” Diamond said, “and I knew he wasn’t answering the phone. But I had just finished the report that I was submitting to the Nobel Prize Committee.” Diamond wanted to tell Amos that he was one of the few nominees for this year's Nobel Prize in Economics. But the Nobel Prize is only awarded to living scholars. Diamond doesn't remember how Amos responded, but Varda Lieberman was with Amos at the time. "Thank you for telling me this news," she heard Amos say. "Please rest assured, I don't intend to miss the Nobel Prize."
He spent the last week of his life at home. Only his wife and children were with him. He had medicine on hand so that he could end his life at any time if he felt that he couldn't hold on any longer. He had even hinted at this to his children. (“What do you think of euthanasia?” he had casually asked his son Tal.) In his last days, his lips began to turn purple and his body began to swell, but he did not take any painkillers. On May 29, Israel held a general election, and hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Shimon Peres. “It seems that I will not see peace in my lifetime,” was Amos’s first reaction, “but I never expected to see peace in my lifetime anyway.” Late on the night of June 1, the children heard footsteps and voices from their father’s room. He may have been talking to himself again, thinking again. On the morning of June 2, 1996, when Amos’s son Oren entered his father’s bedroom again, he found that he was gone.
His funeral felt vague and unreal. Those who attended the funeral could imagine many endings, but it was difficult to imagine that Amos was gone. “I can’t believe he’s really dead.” his friend Paul Slovic said. When Daniel appeared in the crowd and slowly walked to the front row, Amos’s colleagues at Stanford University were shocked. He was like a ghost from the distant past. “He looked absent-minded, even a little frightened,” Avishai Margalit recalled, “It felt as if something hadn’t been finished and had been suddenly called off.” Everyone in the room was wearing a black suit, but Daniel was wearing a shirt—according to Israeli funeral customs. This surprised everyone: Daniel seemed to have forgotten where he was. But there was no doubt that everyone thought Daniel should deliver the eulogy. "Obviously, he was the most suitable candidate." Margalit said.
The content of their last few conversations was mostly about their work, but not entirely. Amos had something to tell Daniel. Amos told Daniel that no one had ever caused him so much pain. Daniel didn't dare respond, he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would be saddened. Amos also said that even to the end, Daniel was still the person he most wanted to talk to. “He said he was most relaxed when talking to me, because I was a person who was not afraid of death,” Daniel recalled, “He understood me, I would not be afraid whenever death came.”
In the days before Amos died, Daniel would talk to him almost every day. When Amos said that he wanted to live as he always had and that he was no longer interested in new things, Daniel asked him why. “Then how should I live? Go to Bora Bora?” Amos replied. Since then, Daniel has never thought of going to Bora Bora again. Whenever he mentions this place, he feels a ripple of unease in his heart. Daniel also suggested that they write something together—a preface to their collection of papers. But before they could finish writing it, Amos left. In their last conversation, Daniel told Amos that he was worried that Amos would not approve of some of the content, because his name would be on it after all. “I said, ‘I’m not sure what to do next.’” Daniel said. “He told me, ‘You know what I would write, write it like that.’”
Daniel chose Princeton University to get away from Amos, and he has never left since. After Amos died, his phone rang a lot more. Although Amos was gone, their research was still there, and it was getting more and more attention. When people mentioned them, it was no longer "Tversky and Kahneman," but "Kahneman and Tversky." In the autumn of 2001, Daniel was invited to attend and speak at a conference in Stockholm. Members of the Nobel Prize Committee and big names in the field of economics were all there. They were there for the Nobel Prize, just like Daniel. "This was a rehearsal." Daniel said. He put a lot of effort into preparing this speech, because he knew that in addition to showing the results of the two people's cooperation, there had to be something new. Some of his friends also found it strange that the Nobel Prize Committee was attracted by a research that was completed by two people working together. "I was invited because of the collaborative results," Daniel said, "but I have to prove that I am also good enough. The question is not whether the results are worthy of the Nobel Prize, but whether I am worthy of it?"
Normally, Daniel doesn’t prepare a manuscript in advance. Once, he gave an impromptu speech at a university graduation ceremony, and everyone thought he had prepared in advance, but he was invited at the last minute. But this time it was different, he carefully polished the manuscript that he was going to read at the Stockholm conference. “I didn’t dare to slack off at all, and I spent a lot of time choosing the background color of the slides.” he said. The theme he was going to talk about was happiness, which was the theme he most wanted to research with Amos but never got the chance to. He talked about how people's expectations of happiness differed from the happiness they actually experienced, and how they differed from the happiness that people remembered. He talked about how to measure it—for example, by getting feedback through questions asked before, during, and after a colonoscopy. He also talked about how, if happiness was so plastic and scalable, then the economic model based on the premise that "humans put 'utility' first" should be questioned. What factors do people put first?
After the meeting, Daniel returned to Princeton. He had a feeling that if he were to win the Nobel Prize, it would be this time. The judges had seen and heard his research in person, and they would judge whether the person was worthy of the prize.
October 9, 2002, the day the Nobel Prize was announced. All the candidates knew that if there was good news from Stockholm, it should be delivered early in the morning. Daniel and Anne stayed at their home at Princeton University, both waiting and not waiting. Daniel was writing a letter of recommendation for one of his excellent students, Terri Odeen. Frankly speaking, he hadn't thought much about what he would do if he won the award. Or rather, he was deliberately not thinking about this issue. When he was a child and experienced war, he used his imagination to weave a beautiful life. He could imagine complex scenes, and he was the center. For example, he imagined himself winning the war single-handedly and ending it. But, given that he was Daniel, he had rules for himself: never fantasize about things that might become reality. If he fantasized about things that could be realized, he would lose his motivation and give up trying. Since they were so real and vivid in his imagination, it was as if he already had them, so why bother to fight for them? He did not have the ability to end the war that took his father’s life, so what was the point of fantasizing about defeating the enemy single-handedly?
Therefore, Daniel did not allow himself to imagine what he would do if he won the Nobel Prize. This was just as well, because the phone didn’t ring. At some point, Anne stood up and said a little sadly: “Okay.” There are disappointed people every year, and there are people who wait by the phone for good news every year. Anne went out to exercise, leaving Daniel alone at home. Daniel was good at dealing with endings where he wanted something but couldn’t get it, so missing out on the big prize wasn’t too heavy a blow for him. He was completely at ease with who he was and what he had done. Now, he could feel free to imagine what he would do if he won the prize. He would take Amos's wife and children with him to receive the award. He would include the eulogy he wrote for Amos at the end of his acceptance speech. He would take Amos with him to Stockholm. He would do for Amos what Amos had never done for him. But now, he had other things to do. He sat back at his desk and continued to write that enthusiastic letter of recommendation for Terri Odeen.
Then, the phone rang.