Review: The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like a lot of people, I read and admired Moneyball, Lewis’s breakthrough book about the ways the Oakland A’s used new statistical analyses to get an edge over better-funded rivals. It was a book about a powerful idea wrapped inside a pretty good story: how one baseball team went from irrelevant small market team to shapers of the sport overall. It had all sorts of great vignettes about obscure finds that panned out and sure things that flamed out, and it all worked in the service of a specific goal: to get the A’s a World Series win.

Moneyball was so good, that it begged a sequel. What, I wondered along with a lot of baseball fans, would the next generation of smarter-than-the-market baseball thinking bring us. Even in the years after the book’s release, it was clear that some of the A’s insights were getting out of date. For instance, the steroid era had effectively cheapened power hitting. If you had someone with a good batter’s eye, it was likelier he’d be able to develop home run power with the help of steroids. (And, sadly, the A’s did have a number of notorious steroid abusers, most famously Jose Canseco.) In the (mostly) post-steroid era, power hitting was again more expensive and no longer reflected a market inefficiency. That didn’t make Moneyball wrong; it just meant that the problem Lewis described so skillfully was evolving.

You can see the residue of a Moneyball sequel in this good, but not quite as good Lewis book. The first chapter here shows how Daryl Morey, the Billy Bean of basketball in his role as the GM of the Houston Rockets, tried to remake basketball statistics along Moneyball principles. That much is an obvious sequel, one that a lesser writer than Lewis would likely have jumped on. Instead, though, Lewis “undoes” that notion. He describes how, early on, Morey discovered that no amount of statistics could overcome the need for human judgement on the promise of a basketball prospect. He needed to rely on scouts’ opinions, but he realized scouts’ opinions were necessarily unreliable. It was a choice not of certainty, or even always of better odds than otherwise, but of the need to embrace the uncertainty of human decision-making. It was a matter of “undoing” what we thought we’d done well.

So, in the introduction and chapter two, this becomes a different book. In the introduction, Lewis tells of responses to Moneyball, and singles out a review of the book from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler that mentions the work of two Israeli thinkers -- Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky – as anticipating what Bean, and even Bill James were doing in baseball. This book becomes Lewis’s answer to Sunstein and Thaler’s review; it becomes his exploration of what Kahneman and Tversky proposed about the fallibility of the human decision-making process.

The ideas the book explores are really interesting ones, and the best parts here come when Lewis renders some slice of them in the clear way he’s so skilled at. I’d heard of confirmation bias, of course, but I get introduced here to all sorts of other decision-making errors. It’s a great experience to realize how easy it is to fall into the errors the two men described, measured, and named.

So the heart of this book is a good nonacademic review of ideas otherwise buried in academic prose. I enjoyed it, and I have the pleasure of feeling smarter for having read it. Still, unlike Moneyball, the great idea(s) isn’t wrapped inside a great story. Lewis spends a lot of time discussing the friendship between Kahneman and Tversky, but there isn’t all that much to it. Set aside the way their lives reflect the early years of the Israeli nation, and this is a story of two opposite personalities who found each other, complemented each other’s thinking, and then slowly drifted apart. There isn’t much meat to it, and that diminishes this as a story.

I give Lewis great credit for excavating his subjects’ work and for refusing to take the easy road to a sequel based on Morey’s experience in basketball. Just as Kahneman and Tversky show us that we have to “undo” much of what we think we know about how our minds work, Lewis “undoes” the obvious book he could have written. The result is something very much worth reading but, as a story that enriches the ideas it explores, it falls short of the excellence of Moneyball.


View all my reviews